Sunday, April 12, 2009 8:23 PM CDT
COLUMN: Paying taxes is not my cup of tea, and some other thoughts
By BILL LAIR, Managing Editor
blair@jg-tc.com
It’s a couple days before federal taxes are due. A group plans a “TEA” Party — Taxed Enough Already — Tuesday evening, and is there anyone who thinks he/she should be paying more taxes than they already are?
Congratulations to Ashmore Township voters for overturning the township ban on liquor sales.
The vote, which received 63 percent approval, means that Lincoln Springs Resort and its Stovepipe Grill restaurant can get a liquor license in a couple months.
In addition to diners being able to have a drink with their barbecue dinners, Lincoln Springs now will be able to attract more banquets, wedding receptions and other group events.
Lincoln Springs won’t be a rural bar. Alcohol sales must be linked to the amount of food sold.
It is another tool for the business to compete with other restaurants and meeting places in Charleston and Mattoon.
I love libraries. I think they will be with us for many years. But it could not have been a surprise to anyone that the referendums to expand the library districts in Mattoon and Charleston failed.
There really was no incentive for voters in the rural areas to approve the measure which would have added another line to their real estate bills.
Eventually, I believe, expanding the library district to include the school districts is the right way for the Mattoon and Charleston libraries to go.
And if you really want to get radical, maybe in a hundred years or so, we can have one library district for Coles County.
But, hey, let’s not do anything too bold!
What I could not figure out in the push to expand the library districts is that neither library planned to reduce its tax rate.
Sure, all agencies and boards could use more revenue, but neither library made any effort to lower their current rate when they would have added a lot of property to their tax rolls.
Jeepers, toss us a bone. Cut the rate by a nickel or something. Taxpayers (remember the TEA Party?) always can use a break — even a small one.
In defense of the libraries, though, people outside the Mattoon and Charleston city limits have a pretty good deal.
If they pay $45 or $50 for a library card, that’s less than we city dwellers pay in property tax!
I saw an article in the Effingham newspaper that the library board in that community recently voted to raise the non-resident card fee from $65 to $115.
We just completed our series of articles on this year’s winners of the Jefferson Award for Public Service.
It’s the sixth class of “unsung heroes” who serve the community in a variety of ways with very little recognition.
A dinner is planned in honor of this year’s recipients — Tom Niemeyer, Pat Morgan, Brian and Mary Bower, Butch Thompson, Hal Nordin and Carol Gapsis.
The dinner is an informal opportunity to meet them and salute them for their efforts.
You are invited to join us at 5:30 p.m. Thursday at the Charleston Country Club. Tickets are $16 a person. Call 238-6824 for a reservation.
Many of you know that I work with the Rotary Youth Exchange program.
We provide opportunities for high school students to spend a year living in another country, learning the culture and language, while students in other countries spend a year in the United States.
I started in Rotary Youth Exchange in 1987, about the same time that Rotary embarked on a massive campaign to eliminate polio in the world.
We’re so close. Rotary has raised more than $500 million to help the World Health Organization and other agencies immunize children in at-risk countries.
An Associated Press story recently noted that Kenya had its first polio infection in 20 years.
Polio mainly strikes children. It is spread primarily by the feces of an infected person getting into the food chain. It causes paralysis and can be fatal.
Rotary’s efforts to eradicate polio have decreased worldwide cases by 99 percent since 1988! Last year, it was only endemic in four countries: Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan.
But those countries have the potential to re-infect anywhere in the world.
Rotary and the Bill Gates Foundation are raising millions more to try to eliminate polio once and for all.
I must have had a couple ‘60s blackouts when writing a column last week on how this decade compares to the 1960s.
Alert reader Allan Keith pointed out two incorrect dates.
The mass shooting at the University of Texas was in 1966, not 1964, as I wrote.
And Charles Fuller shot five Mattoon children in 1968, not 1967.
I got the incorrect Fuller date from a Web site (not jg-tc.com) but my source for the Texas date said 1966 but I wrote it down as 1964.
Actually, I don’t think that mishap is related to anything I did in the ‘60s. It’s more likely to be an indication of how my mind is operating in this decade at my age!
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vakyin wrote on Apr 15, 2009 3:30 PM: