By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
A St. Joseph state representative will put his experience at the city level to work as chair of the House Local Government Committee.
Rep. Bill Falkner, the former St. Joseph city council member and mayor, says municipalities face numerous challenges, including the belief among some state lawmakers that all taxes are bad.
“And a lot of people feel that way, too, but you have to understand government still has to run,” Falkner tells KFEQ/St. Joseph Post. “A municipality still has to provide services.”
Falkner says one of the biggest problems city governments faces is that their employees can make more money in the private sector.
“So, the juggling act is trying to keep qualified and valuable employees to do the job instead of the constant turnover,” Falkner says.
Falkner says cities must have the ability to ask their citizens to raise money to recruit and retain good workers.
“It’s a tightrope that you walk on, trying to make sure that you have adequate funding to pay the people that work for the municipalities to where you can keep qualified people and that’s hard.”
Falkner is bracing for efforts to force all local tax issues onto the November General Election ballot, rather than allow them to remain on the spring or summer election periods. Supporters claim that would shift tax issues to the election which attracts the greatest turnout. Falkner counters that would make an already crowded ballot even more difficult for voters to navigate.
“My biggest concern if they want to try to make everything voted on in November, especially the years where there’s a presidential election, some of those ballots would be three or four pages long,” according to Falkner who says that could also make it difficult for cities to get their message across over all the other campaigns vying for voter attention.
Falkner also argues that while some legislators oppose all tax increases, city residents still expect a certain level of services.
“Everybody still wants their streets fixed, everybody still wants the sewers to work, and snow shoveled and all that,” Falkner says. “It all takes funding and just like everybody else, the wages are going up, the cost of materials is going up, so the cost of running a municipality also goes up.”
Falkner says as St. Joseph mayor he often felt that city government simply served as a training ground to employees who left to take higher pay positions in the private sector.