The National League of Cities is probably a lot like any other national advocacy group. While it tries to represent the interests of all cities, it does in fact come across, at least in my opinion, with a bit of a bias. The bias at NLC is towards large central cities. Most speakers and leaders of the NLC, with the recent exception of Minnetonka Mayor Karen Anderson, are from large cities. Many from the East.
This bias shows through in a number of policy areas. For example, one of the strong NLC positions on homeland security is that local governments ought to reimbursed for their locally incurred homeland security costs by the federal government. I like that sound of that. We’ve incurred costs for homeland security. I would like to fill out a reimbursement form and submit it Washington DC and then wait for my reimbursement check to arrive in next year’s mail.
But is that the best way to handle the sharing of costs for this important governmental function? I think of it like this. The federal government gets its money from the same place that cities, states, school districts, etc get their money: from you and me. Is it efficient for you and me to send our tax dollars to Washington DC only to have them processed and sent to St. Paul and then processed again and then sent to Eden Prairie? I’d say no. That’s not an efficient way to pay for these expenses.
I will admit that I don’t actually know the best way to finance the costs of homeland security, but I do know that creating another Washington DC-based bureaucracy that takes my federal tax dollar and then gives me back thirty-five cents of it to spend on local homeland security expenses is not a good deal for the taxpayers that live in my town. Maybe we’d all be further ahead if we, both private and public sector entities, shouldered the burden of our own homeland security costs. I think if we did that we might think and act differently about alot of things. If we had to shoulder our own costs, maybe other American cities and states would be more judicious about other related political policies.
And so ends my thoughts on the federalization of homeland security costs. Click on the logo to see what the National League of Cities thinks:
