Letter: Economic growth efforts focus on diversifying tax base

Published:

Your Jan. 9 issue

contains two different visions of the city of Hudson.

On the front page, reporter Laura Freeman chronicles the successful efforts of Economic Development Director Chuck Wiedie to attract new business and new business investment to Hudson during 2012.

On the opinion page, the letter "Wonders where Hudson is headed" finds an unkind word to say about almost everyone: our city fathers for their allegedly uncoordinated attempts at municipal planning, the schools for trying to "get into our wallets," and our "gullible community" for supporting schools and "city extravagances" including land-use plans and the new municipal marketing program. I cannot change the writer's mind. But, as a volunteer member of the city of Hudson Economic Growth Board, I do want him to know that all of the efforts to attract and expand business in Hudson have one "over-arching" objective (to use his terminology) - and that is to diversify the tax base, which will accrue to the benefit of all taxpaying citizens. The only alternative is to shrink services and cheapen our schools.

George Snider,

Hudson

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  • And, Mr. Snider, I invite you to read my own letter to the editor, published in the same edition of this newpaper as your own. Do you STILL think there is no room for economizing in city government without "shrink[ing] services"?

  • Mr. Snider ... please don't be naive. The "only alternative" that will sustain us in the long haul will be for City Council (and the Board of Education, for that matter) to become much more efficient with the tremendous resources Hudson residents and taxpayers already "contribute" for our mutual benefit each year. Concerning the city government, City Council does not need to "shrink services" ... it only needs to pay LESS for them. As I've pointed out to City Council and in articles and letters published in this newspaper, we are paying FIVE TIMES as much as we paid our combined full-time workforce on the day merger of the township and village forms of government took effect in 1994. We're paying the Station Manager for our local access cable television station $128,000 a year, or 46% MORE than what Cable 9 pays the Executive Director for running a system 2.25 times the size of our own! (See the related article in the "Citizen Opinion" section of this website.) City bureaucrats are crawling themselves and their salaries continue to grow year after year such that the average non-electric utility worker's annual BASE compensation in 2013 will be over $67,000 (and that includes all of the clerical workers, maintenance people, and others not pulling down anywhere near that kind of money). We can provide high quality services, stretch tax dollars more, and not miss a beat ... if only City Council had the will ... and the nerve! Take a look at the big picture, Mr. Snider. Then again, perhaps as an appointee of the current City Council, you can't afford in your public pronouncements to be anything but an unabashed cheerleader for its current members.