By Tom Blumer | For Ohio Watchdog.
By turning itself into a giant and then defiant speed trap, tinyElmwood Place, Ohio, has accelerated its seemingly inevitable trip into bankruptcy — or annexation, if its residents are lucky.
It’s not difficult to sympathize with the sense of financial desperation accompanied by a possibly valid concern for safety that led the village to install speed cameras at six intersections.
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Elmwood Place has no manufacturing base. A United Dairy Farmers convenience store is among its largest retail establishments.
Until the speed camera idea came along, its general fund revenue was in the middle of shrinking by 9 percent over two years to barely $900,000. Any attempt to further tax its hard-pressed, mostly lower- to middle-income residents surely would cause its population, which shrank by nearly 18 percent during the previous decade to fewer than 2,200 people and only 900 households, to decline even more.