If the news of late has made you want to hide your head and your wallet, you're not alone.
* East Ridge High School's football stadium is beyond repair and it has been condemned. The cost of demolition has been put at $200,000 and the replacement cost hasn't been stated, but Hamilton County Schools Superintendent Rick Smith says the district's budget doesn't have the funds to rebuild it or any number of deteriorating stadiums at other half-century-old sports fields in the county.
* In Chattanooga, Police Chief Fred Fletcher is asking for a $300,000 Band-aid on the Moccasin Bend police firing range so law enforcement groups in the county can maintain certifications for officer training. The city and county really need a new firing range so this one can be cleaned and retired and turned over as promised years ago to the National Park Service to become part of the Moccasin Bend National Archaeological District. But that would cost about $6 million.
Everywhere we turn, there are needs. Legitimate needs.
But if we really want make ourselves depressed, let's rationalize why we don't have the money for those very real needs. And let's examine some of the less-than-very-real needs we've been funding in recent months and years.
Like Tennessee's new $46,000 logo - the "simple" but pricy logo that looks like the postal designation for our state, TN. In fact, it looks so much like our postal geographic description that we can't use it: In June, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected the state's application to register the new logo - a typed TN in white on a red square with a blue line under it that took an outlandish nine months to create.
Yes, $46,000 is chump change, but then there is TNInvestco. TNInvestco is a state program created in 2009 with a mission of using state tax dollars to support entrepreneurship and job creation by funding early-stage companies. Think of it as seed money (or sometimes corporate welfare?) for companies, not unlike TIFS (tax increment financing) and PILOTS (Payments in Lieu of Taxes).
In mid-2014, The Tennessean wrote that as of 2013, 10 TNInvestco funds had allocated $111.2 million to Tennessee companies that used the state seed money to attract another $191 million in "follow-on" dollars, or additional, private investment. As of 2012, the Tennessean wrote, TNInvestco companies were supporting nearly 1,400 jobs.
By our calculations, that would have been about $79,428 per job - each one paid for by us. Another way to look at it might be 111 miles of state roadwork (based on the oft-used Interstate roadwork estimate of a million a mile) left on the backlog.
Also locally, while Chattanooga and Hamilton County officials wrung their collective hands about the cost of our proposed new indoor firing range rising $1 million because of cost increases (as project plans gathered dust) and another $1 million because of anticipated lead cleanup, the city let a federal grant offer run out that would have paid for roughly a third of the price.
By the way, the Friends of Moccasin Bend Park had announced they would raise money to pay for the lead cleanup.
In Chattanooga, we've spent about $1.8 million (granted to the city from federal Congestion Mitigation and Air Quality tax dollars) on bicycle lanes and bicycle lane planning. Did we mention that one of the back-logged highway projects is the interchange modification project at the Interstate 75 and Interstate 24 split in Brainerd and East Ridge, estimated at $70 million? Does anyone seriously think the 50 or so people who may bicycle to work daily on Chattanooga streets can prevent the equivalent of the smog created by just one of the several-a-day traffic jams at the 75/24 split?
And yes, these highway-related funds are probably different pots of money, but they are all our dollars and smart leaders should be able to figure out a better use for them than bicycle lanes.
This brings us to schools and stadiums and county spending. Actually, here we should term this the county mis-spending and/or missing spending.
Our county officials would just about rather be caught on Ashley Madison's hacked website as spend money outside of their $900,000 a year discretionary funds, which they voted 8-1 to take out of the county's rainy-day fund and keep for themselves after County Mayor Jim Coppinger specifically left those funds out of the new budget.
The commissioners wouldn't raid that savings to help put more funding in schools or public safety, but they would and did raid it to make sure they could nickel-and-dime their way to curry favor and votes. Example: two commissioners recently gave $10,000 apiece to the Veterans Memorial Park of Collegedale.
Recent headlines make it clear that we have lots of needs. We also have lots of empty-headed spending.