Return to Mayberry: City Council's Archaic Thinking

So, at last night's city council meeting there was much talk about chickens, a little talk about fees for sports leagues to use city fields, and A LOT of talk about the budget commission and supplemental taxes.

As to the legalization of chicken keeping in Woonsocket.This is a no brainer.

Anyone who has even the vaguest idea of how chicken and eggs are produced in this country should want to raise their own. The inhumane treatment of these animals that goes on at battery farms is disgusting. It promotes disease and offers no respect to these birds that provide sustenance to so many. Anyone who stands against this ordinance suffers from a lack of intellectual curiosity, or worse, willful ignorance.

Not one outbreak of salmonella in eggs or chicken meat has been epidemiologically linked to free-range or backyard chickens in the last century. All of these outbreaks are, and have been, the direct result of the unsanitary conditions at battery cage farms.

Charging out-of-town and adult sports leagues for using city fields is not outrageous on it's face. Most other cities have some sort of fee schedule, but those cities also have budgets for their Parks and Rec departments. I would be all for charging these fees if the money was restricted for use by the Parks department, but the budget commission and council are using these fees to close a budget gap that, frankly, shouldn't exist in the first place.

The problem with the argument is that, amidst all of the talk as to how to raise revenue, there is NO talk about reducing overhead. The lights on our city fields are old and inefficient, and might be pricey to replace with new, efficient, High Intensity LED lights, but the savings realized could offset those costs in less than 2 years. Furthermore, there are companies in Rhode Island that will retrofit these lights for NO UPFRONT COST! I'd be willing to bet that the largest expenditure, next to labor,  in the Parks department is the per field lighting costs.

Once again, we see a lack of intellectual curiosity or willful ignorance on the part of the leaders of this city. These solutions are out there, and as is the nature of technology, getting better every day, but our captains seem unaware that they even exist.

The conversation about supplemental taxes is another thing altogether, but the problem of archaic thinking still persists.

The city spends roughly $2.5 million on heating and powering our public buildings and spaces, and that's with all of the streetlights on. With an effort to upgrade the efficiency of our public buildings and lighting, a savings of 50 percent or more is possible, and again, there are companies out there that will do the upgrades for NO UPFRONT COST. They calculate the savings, and take a portion of those savings on the back end to get paid.

So there. I just saved the city $1.25 million, which is exactly half of the $2.5 million that the budget commission has tasked the city with finding in the next fiscal year.

Now, if you coupled that savings with solar energy installations on the bevy of municipally-owned flat roofs with good southern exposure which is, by the way, all of them, you further reduce your load - possibly even eliminating electricity bills for some buildings altogether. Let's start with our schools.

On top of this, given the state's new renewable energy laws, Woonsocket could sell any excess electricity produced back to the grid, and create a NEW REVENUE STREAM that isn't dependent on taxing the already onerously taxed citizens of Woonsocket.

Never mind thinking outside of the box. We need to jump out of the box, trample it, and burn it to the ground. There are other ways to create revenue without raising taxes. There are other ways to cut overhead without slashing city staff budgets to the point where our process moves at a snail's pace.