items tagged with Davenport

The Quad-City Times endorses the Promise program in Sunday's edition. "Put Faith in Davenport's Kids" is the editorial's title. One commenter noted that this endorsement was from the "Staff" and not the "Editorial Board," suggesting dissent between the staff and board.
The Times' all-percieved-growth-at-any-cost/risk-if-it's-taxpayer-funded record is consistent here. They admonish opponents who spent too much time on spreadsheets.  "Astute analysts have poked and prodded Promise to assert it cannot pay for itself. That’s a standard we’ve not applied to other government functions and won’t apply to this one." This comment brings into focus the proponents' acceptance that providing for one's college education should be a municipal "government function."

A diverse crowd of protesters gathered at the corner of Brady and Locust streets in central Davenport today, unified in their contempt for last year's bailouts and this year's stimulus bill approved by Congress and signed by Obama last week. (The bill is the H.R.1—American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and can be read at http://www.opencongress.org/bill/111-h1/show.  The following story includes a 4 minute video log of interviews at the protest.)

I just wanted to provide an insight from a family that left Davenport because of the schools. I grew up in Bettendorf, moved to Davenport, and after having children moved them to Geneseo, as I refused to put them in the Davenport school system. As a parent, I would not subject my children to 13 years in that school system to earn money for college. Not only is the crime rate in that school system high, but the schools do not adequately prepare the kids for college.

I was chairman of the board of the Davenport Chamber of Commerce when it successfully promoted passage of the one-cent sales tax. There was enthusiasm for infrastructure improvements then and, clearly, that enthusiasm remains.

The most recent Davenport Community Survey finds residents give their highest priority to continue improving the city's streets and infrastructure. That is fact.

Approving the "Promise" proposal would divert millions of dollars from such work. That, too, is fact.

The various claimed benefits of Promise are not facts. They are estimates and questionable ones at that.

For the sake of argument, let's say that the Promise program will be the panacea for Davenport that its backers claim it will be. People will flood into the city because they've been promised college tuition, vocational training, or (if they're in the military) a homestead grant. Enrollment in the Davenport Community School District will reverse its nearly-two-decade-long trend of decline - thus ensuring a greater amount of state education funding, which is distributed on a per-pupil basis. And the increased aggregate property value will bring new riches to city government and the school district through property taxes, thus allowing them to lower the property-tax rate.

Even if all that is true, the backers of the Davenport Promise have structured the program all wrong.

Now that the Davenport City Council has approved a March 3 referendum on the Davenport Promise proposal, one can be certain that the coalition that has been built over the past year-plus is being mobilized to demonstrate broad community support.

It will not be technically affiliated with any major community player, but it will include a lot of familiar names and faces behind the scenes. It will undoubtedly feature "real," everyday citizens, so voters won't feel like they're getting bullied by the heavy hitters. And the campaign will basically argue that there's no sensible reason to vote against the Promise, that there's no way the program could fail, and that the risk of voting the proposal down is too great.

That style of PR push was the successful approach of backers of River Renaissance in 2001. And the work in 2007 and 2008 of a Promise exploratory committee and a Promise task force has looked less like objective analysis than propaganda.

But don't mistake the marketing for unanimity.

Included here are the responses we received to our economic-growth questionnaire, which was sent to 20 representatives of local governments and economic-development organizations.

Every child in Davenport gets a big chunk of a college education paid for. The city's police and fire departments get a new stream of revenue. Paying for it all is an existing tax. While property taxes would likely rise modestly for a few years, they'd be back below current levels by 2014.

And the ultimate goal is a growing community with a larger tax base, which in the long run could mean more money for schools and city services with lower property-tax rates.

Who could possibly be against that?