DREAM CITY 2020: Springs city government needs to be revamped

EDITOR'S NOTE:This is the third in a series of columns about the future of the Pikes Peak region written by community leaders and visionaries. It's part of the ongoing community initiative Dream City: Vision 2020.

"Cognitive Dissonance," is an artful phrase often quoted by conservative political columnist George Will. In a Sept. 8 Newsweek article he explains the phase as "believing, sincerely, contradictory ideas."

He further writes, "Today, Americans seem to demand a government that is an omnipresent and omniprovident cornucopia of entitlements, but that is also small and imposes low taxes. Dissonance? This is cognitive cacophony."

I was taken aback by the veracity of the statements, and for a moment I thought that he was talking about El Paso County in general and Colorado Springs in particular.

Our form of city governance is woefully out of sync with the pace of the modern economic world and is a system that needs to be quickly revamped if we're going to build a successful community by 2020.

I commend those who have served and currently serve for their civic service, but I strongly believe that we get what we pay for. What precisely do we pay for? We, the taxpayers, generously offer a $500 per month stipend for being elected to council.

So those who are in public service must be: a) independently wealthy or b) retired. Their backgrounds may differ significantly from the socio-economic life experiences of our diverse community, thereby creating obstacles to public policy decisionmaking. We also drastically reduce the pool of talented candidates.

We have the fifth-largest (per capita) population of military retirees. Probably, most of these distinguished folks would bridle at being labeled as generous recipients of entitlements. They'd tell you: "We have served our country proudly and do not eat at the public trough!"

The reality is that we all are living longer because of advances in the medical world, and the costs of providing those services are exacerbated by the Medicare, Medicaid and Tricare system.

At the very least, this fosters a mindset within our conservative, aging voters that since they have fixed incomes, they cannot and will not pay for any new taxes, and they become consumers rather than citizens. In simple terms, because they don't need new schools and other services, they should not have to pay for them.

Now, for the inconvenient truth.

The "cognitive dissonance" part is that unless we have an educated, stable, YOUNG work force that drives our economic engines, who actually pays for Social Security, Medicare, etc.? Even if we use the most forgiving cost-of-living and inflation indices, the current cost of those services will never equate to past contributions to the system.

We are (in) famous for having the proud architect of TABOR. What started off as a fairly good idea became a nightmare because the framers were not prudent enough to allow for a mandated, but revenue-generated, protected system of savings that would be available when we experience a bad economic cycle. (Is it just me, or does it seem that we have not had a good economic cycle for a fairly long time?)

As a patriotic American, I was very proud of the way that we discarded our partisanship and embedded differences to unite as a nation after the 9/11 crisis. We took umbrage at the acts of terrorism, became indivisible in our resolve not to be cowed and in the process of healing, rekindled our citizenship.

Perhaps we need an economic crisis in our city and county to appreciate and remember with nostalgia the services and good citizenship that previously defined our quality of life. To dream, we need a vision, and to see the vision become reality, we need leaders.

Stipends, anyone? Whither the tax-paying citizens?

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Jay Patel is a community activist and the current co-chairman of the Colorado Springs Diversity Forum.