Welcome
to
– The Business
Unfriendly City!
(A Satirical Memo from the Mayor – written by Ron
West)
My fellow majority council
members,
It has come to my attention that
we may not be clearly stating our position to potential new businesses that
might consider our fair city as a new home for their companies. Since such a lack of understanding leads to
future problems for us on the council, I would like to use our city newsletter
to spell out some of our important policies for such prospects. I believe that we all share the same concerns
and support the following important positions:
1)
Business
Identification – Since we are all
vitally concerned about the esthetic beauty of our city, all new business must
be advised that all new signage is restricted to tombstones. These are monument signs with specific
requirements that fully limit just how far they may be seen. We don’t want any more ugly old pole signs
built in our city. If a new business is
considering a location within our city that already has a pole sign that they
think they might use, they need to forget it.
We would rather have a blank pole sign than one with a new name on
it. Just so they know we mean business,
we have already directed our staff to illegally deny a certificate of occupancy
if they don’t cut down any pole sign on a location they select. (We don’t have any ordinances that require
this and we do not comply with the current state law regarding such signs – but
we do have the power to block occupancy anywhere in our city anyway.)
2)
Don’t Threaten Us – We have been challenged by some prospective new business owners in
the past and think that new prospects should know that we have a contract with
a very powerful an influential city attorney who stands to benefit from any
challenge of anything we do – right or wrong!
We pay him to advise us and we pay him to defend all the wrongful
actions of the city. If anyone decides
to challenge us, they just need to be prepared to pay a lot of money out for
nothing. We also know what shopping for
a Judge is and would consider doing so if necessary to defeat any threat to our
actions.
3) Landscaping – Like signage, we know what is and what is not
beautiful in our city. New prospective
businesses need to submit their plans for any new development or location well
in advance so that our city experts (including one lady council member) can
advise them on our requirements for beautification of the selected
property. We will be requiring the
expenditure of a lot of their money to make sure that their new business meets
our definition of beauty.
4) For
Developers Only – Please understand
that we will kiss the ### of any developer to get them into our city. When they build new houses, we get a lot of
new taxes and we are not concerned with quality of life, congestion, debt or
anything else that might slow them down.
They need to know that if the neighbors around the area they want to develop
are not up to their standards, they just need to let us know and we will take
measures against the residents with some of our lesser known or hidden
ordinances. We will not tolerate any
complaints from any of our existing residents if it will inconvenience new
developers.
5) Special
Deals – Again Developers, need to be
advised to contact us if they have a large development in mind. We have found that we can bend the intent of
state legislation regarding Tax Increment Financing Districts to “help” them
(and ourselves). In reality, we have
found that TIF’s such as our “Hometown NRH” allow us
to divert tax money that would otherwise go into funding city services into
special funds that we can spend for our pet projects. While we know this may not directly help a
new developer, they need to know that if they help us, maybe we will allow them
concessions like the 29 successive concessions we allowed Arcadia Corp.
6) Small
Business – If a new prospective
company falls under the small business classification, they need to be advised
that we will allow them to locate in our city as long as they strictly comply
with all of our wants and wishes. They
need to know that we don’t tolerate complainers. An individual small business probably doesn’t
bring enough new tax revenue into our city to make the proverbial drop in the
bucket. While we must allow them to
locate here – we do not to have to make it easy or fun. We cater to big business and developers and
if that is not OK with small business owners they might need to consider
7) Taxes – We want to be up front with all new prospects. We are not welcoming new businesses here
because we like or need them. We just
want the new taxes to spend. We put out
a lot of propaganda to our residents about how new business helps our city but
we do not tell them that it will help lower their taxes. We clearly know what is best for our city and
we keep all the new taxes we can find so that we can spend them without having
to explain big increases in spending to the citizens. With this in mind, prospective new businesses
of all kinds need to know that we plan to increase the taxes and fees on new
businesses as fast and as big as we can find a way to do so. We never have as much money to spend as we
want to spend.
8) Ordinances
Regarding Your Business – As we all know,
we have the power to write any laws we wish to control all business activity in
our city. Such laws are called
ordinances and we do not publicly publish or discuss them prior to their
approval. If any new business comes in
and dares to do anything we don’t like we will write a new ordinance and make
it retroactive to control them.
Prospects should not think that they can find out all of our “secret”
ordinances prior to locating here. We
have taken effective steps to make our laws so difficult to find in an
understandable form, that such an attempt would be impossible. Anyone can verify this by visiting our award
winning library (that we plan to tear down and make into a new hotel) and
trying to find anything in the ordinances books contained there. A clue to the wise would have to be to
remember to try to follow the “amendments” because we do not incorporate them
into the language of the affected ordinances.
In plain English, we have done such a good job of “obfuscation” that we
don’t believe that anyone – except our illustrious city attorney – can figure
out the real laws of our city!
9) Public
Opposition – If anyone happens to
have a business that we would actually like to have in our city due to all the
new taxes they might generate for us, we should probably advise them that we
believe that our most of our citizens are quite dumb. We told the citizens that they didn’t
understand that a tax freeze on the seniors and disabled would not be good for
them but a few “political terrorists” stirred up the old folks and got them to
vote for it anyway. Now that they got
their freeze, we will probably have to raise the rates, fees and other stuff to
continue to increase our spending like we are used to doing. We have clearly demonstrated to the citizens
that we have the power to spend whatever we want and we also have the power to
override any objections from our ill informed and ignorant populace. The bottom line is that we can step on any
opposition that develops to any new business locating here. (Remember how successful we were with my
cement plant?)
10) Need Land? –
While we are publicly proclaiming
that we have no plans to use our “eminent domain” proceedings to take private
property to spur private development, we all know that we can and will use this
power to help locate a really juicy tax producer in our city. We must keep on kidding our voters to keep
them from voting against us. We have
some “studies” underway that will point out to our dumb citizens that taking
their land to allow such development is good for them. While some of them may object, most will be
so eager to get paid for their slummy property, we won’t have any
problems. Even the land around our
current library might offer a quality hotel operator a real opportunity if you
know of anyone who might be interested.
We need to get rid of this old library so we can continue our $10
Million spending plan to benefit the residents of Hometown NRH as promised.
While this is only a partial list of our
“requirements” for new businesses in our
Cordially,
What the Mayor might write if presenting
the “real” current situation in NRH!
(Reproduction
or re-publishing of this column is granted by the author.)
Watch for Part II of this Satirical Account : Welcome to