In due course, taxpayers in the city of Bellevue who opposed a tax hike to pay for city services will have second thoughts about what's happening to their community.
By then, if the city is to play catch-up and remedy the neglect, the costs are likely to be far greater to restore services.
This is the classic result of penny-wise-pound-foolish thinking. One can look to the Idaho Legislature's utterly disastrous budget thinking in neglecting upkeep of public schools. If and when a court order is carried out, lawmakers will need to spend far more on dilapidated and rundown schools than had they not delayed the inevitable.
So, as reluctant Bellevue City Council members take an axe to the budget by eliminating the fire chief (can higher fire insurance premiums for homeowners be far behind?) and trimming spending for street repairs, the library, the marshal's office and city parks, a period of deteriorating city services is about to begin.
Residents who resent their community moving backward instead of forward need not blame their city government, whose budgets have been austere. Their anger should be focused on naysayers and their opposition to a prudent tax increase.
There's a lesson here for the City Council: It should instruct the city administrator to collect specific examples of what is not being done for residents over the next year as the result of budget cuts, and show taxpayers how their community has been shortchanged.
The consequences of neglect provide powerful evidence that tax increases often can be acts of civic responsibility.
