Steve Mensing, Editor
♦ I’d like to draw your attention to a video we posted much earlier this morning about Stockton, California’s overnight fall from being a prosperous city by the sea to a dangerous crime ridden slum with little police and fire protection. Morgan Spurlock “Inside Man” does a super job of capturing the “Stockton Effect” wherein “build it and they come” projects turned a city overnight into a bankrupt slum.
Stockton’s dramatic fall from grace, though a series of domino effects, and its bankruptcy serves as a powerful object lesson for persons in municipal leadership positions who fail to look down the road at future consequences and gamble on thoughtless major projects with taxpayer money and even with city employee’s nest eggs.
Bad gambles rocked Harrisburg, PA and Detroit, MI into bankruptcies. We can see how Salisbury’s city services began disappearing and Salisbury visbly tumbled. Was this tumble the result of Salisbury’s well-noted “build it and they will come” fiber optic fiasco? No doubt Fibrant was a major contributing factor.
Look at our stats for crime, education, and soaring poverty. “Build it and they will come” projects are a major factor is Salisbury’s steep decline. Examine all the city-wide vacancies and the vast numbers of houses for sale. The moving vans transporting families onto the highway of urban flight. Cries for help against the tidal wave of crime from various parts of the city like the West End.
The hammer is coming down hard and so far we see nothing from the city’s alleged leadership that even pretends to turn the city fortunes around. Their answers so far: build a “needle park” near the state’s largest homeless shelter, nag for an over-priced Taj Mahal on a bad dirt to magically rescue the Empire to take 7 banks off the hook (thank goodness the school system snubbed this). And now they want to construct apartments downtown when the area has a surplus of empty apartments and office spaces. Should I even mention our fearless leaders attempts to subvert traffic signals and employ traffic calming measures to destroy our chain retail and eating establishments (major contributors to our city’s tax base) throughout Salisbury and make the Bury even more irritating to drive through? They want to drive traffic down Main Street. Really.
Is it any wonder why people are packing up and fleeing the Bury?
Here is an entertaining and eye-opening Stockton, California video report:
http://rowanfreepress.com/2014/04/27/video-when-stockton-california-went-bankrupt/
