Farewell. The Flying Pig Has Left The Building.

Steve Hynd, August 16, 2012

After four years on the Typepad site, eight years total blogging, Newshoggers is closing it's doors today. We've been coasting the last year or so, with many of us moving on to bigger projects (Hey, Eric!) or simply running out of blogging enthusiasm, and it's time to give the old flying pig a rest.

We've done okay over those eight years, although never being quite PC enough to gain wider acceptance from the partisan "party right or wrong" crowds. We like to think we moved political conversations a little, on the ever-present wish to rush to war with Iran, on the need for a real Left that isn't licking corporatist Dem boots every cycle, on America's foreign misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. We like to think we made a small difference while writing under that flying pig banner. We did pretty good for a bunch with no ties to big-party apparatuses or think tanks.

Those eight years of blogging will still exist. Because we're ending this typepad account, we've been archiving the typepad blog here. And the original blogger archive is still here. There will still be new content from the old 'hoggers crew too. Ron writes for The Moderate Voice, I post at The Agonist and Eric Martin's lucid foreign policy thoughts can be read at Democracy Arsenal.

I'd like to thank all our regular commenters, readers and the other bloggers who regularly linked to our posts over the years to agree or disagree. You all made writing for 'hoggers an amazingly fun and stimulating experience.

Thank you very much.

Note: This is an archive copy of Newshoggers. Most of the pictures are gone but the words are all here. There may be some occasional new content, John may do some posts and Ron will cross post some of his contributions to The Moderate Voice so check back.


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Monday, November 8, 2010

Municipal Contraction

By Dave Anderson:


Over the weekend, my family received a flier from our borough government that there is a special borough meeting on Wednesday night.  The subject of the meeting is fiscal contraction.  The borough's revenue is falling significantly short of expectations and the debate will be on what services to contract or cut. 


The town provides good police, a hybrid paid and volunteer fire protection, code enforcement and an independent streets/park department.  The major locally controlled revenue streams are a 1% income tax and local property taxes.  The borough also receives a portion of the 1% county sales tax and significant pass throughs from the state government. 


Last year, the budget was balanced through a combination of draining reserves and stable state-pass through funding.  Several municipal employees also retired and those positions were either not filled (which decreases state funding for pension payments) or filled at a significantly lower pay-scale.  Those measures are not available this year as the state budget is likely to be further cut and the ARRA Medicaid reimbursement bonus rate that floated most state budgets to bad instead of horrendous is phasing out shortly. 


My preferred solution is to contract for fire coverage with the city of Pittsburgh for at least the western portion of town, and with Edgewood for the eastern portion of the borough, as well as entering talks to merge police functions with Edgewood.  I'm personally willing to pay more in taxes as I am generally very happy with the level and quality of town services (for instance, when we received 30 inches of snow last February, the borough was plowed out within 60 hours while Pittsburgh was not plowed out for 2 weeks.) 


I'm not sure what the solutions the borough council will present on Wednesday night.  However, I know that lay-offs are likely to be a part of all the presented options and that similar discussions will be occuring in the next nine months in thousands of small municipal governments across the country. 


 



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1 comment:

  1. JefNovember 10, 2010 at 12:50 AM

    Forget two weeks, my street in the South Side never got plowed. We just had to wait for it all to melt away.

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