The Voice of New Rochelle: Green Lakes and Gazebos

The next time someone tells you that there is no growth in America today let them come to New Rochelle, to the shores of Beechmont Lake. 

There they will find enough algae and other uncontrolled vegetation floating on the surface to seemingly allow a small animal to simply walk across it. According to Democratic Councilman Barry Fertel, in whose District 5 the large pond resides, the condition can be remedied for a cool $1 million. 

A rash of recent phone calls on Good Morning Westchester’s Open Phone segments has focused on repairing the gazebo and putting benches back in Hudson Park. While not a seven-figure job, these tasks will nonetheless cost a few dollars that will have to come from someplace. 

International political scholars refer to these kinds of problems as “guns or butter” issues. While the analogy is a loose one, the dynamic is the same. 

On the sovereign state level, it is often necessary to shore up your army and national security projects, instead of, say, investing in farming or social programs. 

The reasoning is sound. What good is chicken pot pie if a jihad warrior is making his way to your kitchen to put a burka on mom, cut dad’s throat and send the kids off to Islamic school? Better to have a smaller pie and a skinnier chicken to bake it in. 

On the local level we have choices, as well. For example, in one firehouse in town there are only three firefighters on duty. Almost everyone agrees that we don’t have enough cops. 

The Bramson administration is under fire for not having invested in the . And right down, literally, where the rubber meets the road, we still have potholes to fill from last winter’s storms. 

Now I am no expert, but I do see how some of the other municipalities in Westchester are run just as a function of doing the news everyday.  In my humble view, New Rochelle runs a fairly tight fiscal ship. 

Nonetheless, how many firefighters would have to go away to dredge the lake? Are the gazebo and park benches equal to the value of one police officer or just the cost of stretching out the pothole repairs until next year?

How much would it have cost to fix the church, and how many folks would be yelling about that expense, now, when they found out that the city did not even have enough money to staff the inspectors that should have caught the ? 

It seems to me that many local residents are drunk on America’s latest intoxicant—tea—the well-intended, yet toxic, brew that is the Tea Party. This group seems to believe that all taxes are bad and all government is worse. 

More troubling, some of our local residents are confusing local City Manager forms of government with the less desirable aspects of federal programs. 

Tea partiers appear unable or unwilling to find the truth that is the middle ground between their correct assessment that a good deal of what the federal government does is wasteful and ineffective, versus the reality that the very might of the Hamiltonian federal financial and banking system in this country is at the heart of their own prosperity. They are also unable or unwilling to believe that much of what they value is—perish the thought—“socialist” in nature. 

Think the military and the socialist system that allows veterans not wounded in battle to get lifetime government-run—aaagh—health care. Ask them why we subsidize farmers, oil companies and businesses that outsource jobs. Ask why it is that Tea Partiers are the first local residents to complain when the issue of reassessment comes up? 

I mean, is there anything more American than paying your fair share? Don’t get me wrong. All of these things are value judgments that we make in the spirit of the public good and common sense. 

Common sense, though, never seems to be present when you talk with these folks. Bush never contributed to the debt, Reagan never raised taxes, Obama is a Marxist and God is an American.  

The next time someone tries to justify to me the likes of Michele Bachmann or demand that Beechmont Lake be dredged without taxes going up, I will read the quote I keep taped to my PC: “It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument.” 

Credit goes to a politician by the name of William Gibbs McAdoo, as reported in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

It keeps me sane.