Safety paths are a dandy concept and a swell thing to have in a community.
But we have a serious issue with asking voters to impose a new tax on themselves during these dire economic times.
People are losing jobs. Homes are being foreclosed on left and right. Gasoline is around $4 a gallon. Groceries are going up in price while packaging goes down in size.
Whether your collar is blue or white, people at all ends of the economic spectrum are hurting.
Just ask the people at Oxford/Orion FISH as they watch their food pantry lines get longer and longer.
Simply put ? now is not the time to be asking for new taxes. In fact, it’s the worst possible time to being asking folks to add yet another millage to the already long list printed on their summer and winter tax bills.
Times are tough all over and creating new taxes won’t make them any easier.
We also feel it’s the height of hypocrisy for township officials to ask residents to approve a safety path tax seeing as they didn’t install one along Dunlap Rd. when they built their new water treatment plant and township hall. If you’re going to talk the talk, you’ve got to walk the walk.
We strongly urge Oxford township and village residents to vote NO on the 10-year, 0.25-mill safety path tax.
However, we also urge the township to keep pursuing grants and private donations for safety paths.
If this community can raise $130,000 in 109 days for Kids Kingdom and is working on raising $390,000 for a splash pad, surely we can get a group together to raise private funds for safety paths. Let’s make raising taxes a last resort. ? CJC