Quote Originally Posted by Novine View Post
We all know the problem - Detroit residents and businesses pay way more in taxes for sub-standard services as compared to what they could get for their tax dollars in many of the suburbs. I'm not sure who among your audience is unfamiliar with this. If this was the first time this had been discussed on the pages of the Freep, you might get a pass. But how many editorials do we have to read about the decline of Detroit and Michigan that tell us "we need to fix things" and never propose real solutions?"
We may all "know the problem," but one of the reasons things don't get fixed is that there isn't a focus on specific problems, placed in context, and discussed through to solutions.
we have never looked as specifically at the city's tax burden as we began doing today... And we won't have proposed the solutions I intend for us to endorse...
That's what we're trying to do with this work this year. Sorry if you feel like it's treading old ground; it won't be once we're talking about concrete ways the tax burden might be lightened, or how the city's unproductive land might be repurposed, or the whole list..

I love that you are looking to the ed pages for solutions - but I'd caution a little patience.. all of this stuff is complicated, and it will require a pretty methodical approach. Even then, I can't guarantee that I'll come up with some magic bullet solution to any of it.. Just trying to come up with ways to get people discussing these things specifically, and thinking about what to do!