My Redacted Life: Chapter 32 (Cont._4)

With marriage looming, we began to consider finances carefully. The state begrudgingly paid teachers around $400 to $500 per month, some two to three thousand a month less than the school superintendent in Little Rock paid his secretary, A distant dream was to purchase a house after we were married. Wasn’t that what a young married couple was supposed to do?

We began, based on our anticipated income, to determine how much house we could afford. The answer was staggering. Millionaires, my father insisted, lived in $20,000 homes and only the sorriest wastrels lived in homes built entirely by someone else. People in the know said “Buy a little more house than you could afford and, as your income increased, you would “grow into it.”

I’ve thought about this a lot since. Back then, I just fretted about it.

At the same time, I was dealing with the financial condition of our cities. They faced a different set of problems. A young couple running short of money could always work harder or get a higher paying job. Cities faced a finite revenue source. Property taxes paid a paltry amount of fees and revenue streams from utilities paid some. State turnback from fuel taxes helped with streets. As mentioned in an earlier segment, places like Conway Country, Arkansas, produced funds from their speed trap enterprises. How much of those funds went to pay for public services is anybody’s guess.

Cities relied on two or three sources for large capital projects. They are allowed to issue General Obligation bonds based on a defined increase in property taxes as the source of payment. Utility revenue streams could also create projects to be undertaken through bond issues. Then there were massive grant programs through the federal government for specified categories of projects. Local sales tax options were years away.

Cities managed somehow. Plans were based on predicted growth patterns. Oddly, predictions almost always matched the population needed to create enough revenue to carry out the plan or to fund an individual project. Fancy methods of prediction used birth rates, death rates, migration patterns, and the ability of specific cohorts to propagate. Nobody really understood the methodology. I suppose that was the intent.

Sadly, there would be only one major generator of population growth or decline among our cities in the coming years. Like an earth tremor awakening a sleeping monster, the cause was slowly winding through the federal court system on its way to the Supreme Court. It would have very little to do with quality of life, economic development, public administration, or good planning.

It would have everything to do with which way school buses ran.

I couldn't help but wonder
where this was all headed.