ADDING INSULT TO INJURY.

Municipal governments can change their property assessments to pay for what they think of as improvements.  Consider Milwaukee's streetlight upgrades, for instance.

What happens, though, when what the selectmen think of as improvements look like public overreach?  Here's an excerpt from Charles "Strong Town" Marohn's new book.

As I write this, my city is seeking bids for what they say in the official notice is a “street improvement project.” It does not seem like an improvement to me, nor to many people who unsuccessfully fought against it, yet formally it is called an improvement.

The project involves the widening of a residential street. The many young families who live there believe that the changes will dramatically increase automobile speeds, which already seem too fast. To widen the street, quite a few mature trees will be removed, and the city has acquired part of the front yards of many of these neighbors, often against their will. To add insult to injury, to help fund the project, these aggrieved property owners are being forced to pay the city a special assessment fee of thousands of dollars.

There's a reason "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you" doesn't always inspire confidence.  The street widening gets into the budget, and perhaps qualifies for some infrastructure pork, because the existing street doesn't meet whatever the current engineering standards are.  "From the perspective of the design professional, the current street is 'substandard' because, given the design speed the professional has chosen and the number of vehicles they want to accommodate, it does not meet the recipe in the design cookbook."  Never mind that higher property taxes, perhaps permanently, combined with lower resale values for those houses, as parents recognize the neighborhood is less suitable for bringing up the kids, and flee to other neighborhoods where perhaps the road experts are subject to more constraints.