By Mike Matejka
The Bloomington City Council did the right thing on Monday night, by voting for a one percent sales tax increase.
The biggest issue facing Bloomington is the structural deficit. City services and staff were already trimmed during the 2009 deficit. There was not that much left to cut. By biting the bullet and increasing the sales tax, the city can begin to balance its budget again.
The other two issues that the City agreed to cover with the funds are infrastructure repair – streets, bridges and water systems – and mental health services.
It doesn’t take much driving around potholes to know Bloomington needs to pour some concrete and lay some asphalt. Underground water and sewer systems are not obvious until they break, but much of Bloomington’s system is decades old. There have been quite a few streets in Bloomington down to one lane this past summer, because city crews were patching antiquated underground system.
The final piece of this puzzle is mental health. McLean County as a whole deserves credit for tackling this issue. The recent attack on pedestrians downtown by an erratic individual was a signal that we need mental health services. What is commendable here is that social service agencies, the county and both Bloomington and Normal are approaching this in a comprehensive fashion. Warehousing people with mental illness is not the answer, often with some resource allocation their lives can be stabilized and they don’t just end up in the jail or a trip to the emergency room. County board chair Matt Sorensen, Mayor Tari Renner and Mayor Chris Koos, plus numerous other community advocates, deserve credit for insuring we’ll have funds to work with this population and not just consign them to homelessness or temporary stays in jail.
Bloomington and Normal have not aligned on their sales tax allocation. Normal was still looking at assisting Connect Transit, a soccer complex and economic development. And as a community, we still have to look at our school funding, particularly with the uncertainty of state funding.
For now, Bloomington needs to stabilize and emerge from the deficit hole. Once that is done, other issues can be addressed and shared. It takes political courage to support a tax increase, and I commend the council members who voted “yes” for doing the right thing.
Mike Matejka is the Governmental Affairs director for the Great Plains Laborers District Council, covering 11,000 union Laborers in northern Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota. He lives in Bloomington with his wife and daughter and their two dogs. He served on the Bloomington City Council for 18 years, is a past president of the McLean County Historical Society and Vice-President of the Illinois Labor History Society.
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