I was one of more than 60 people who watched on Zoom the Sept. 3 special meeting of the Greenfield City Council on the citizen’s referendum.
What troubles me as a taxpayer is how much it will cost us to bring all of this new housing into Greenfield? This gets expensive real fast.
What’s the actual cost to our infrastructure of adding hundreds of housing units? Can we sustain all these costs to our already strained school budget, or our police and fire costs? Our sewage treatment capacity? We are already in the middle of a declared water shortage.
Housing is a break-even proposition at best. Families moving in have kids that need to be educated. Some of the people arriving in Greenfield need support services — on a continuing basis. Our energy costs are skyrocketing.
Our property taxes are getting out of hand. Growth has a cost burden, especially for residential property owners, who pay more than two-thirds of the city’s tax burden. People can’t make ends meet on Aldi or Starbucks starting wages. We’ve got a living wage crisis we need to solve, too.
It’s irresponsible to yell “crisis” in a crowded budget. We need to be careful what we wish for.
Al Collins
Greenfield