Majority agreement of a known population is called a consensus. Political populations include the members of tax-districts, precincts, and legislative districts. Registered voters are the known population with respect to citizenship. It can be argued that ideally the general population and the population of registered voters should be, as close as possible to, the same thing. More on this latter. What is currently lacking in the great social experiment of self governance is the existence of consensus statements for local political populations. How to achieve government of, by, and for the citizenry is the aim. However, the initial question is whether the public wants to pursue this aim or not?
In Sheridan County the tax-districts have a hierarchical order to the number of mill levy entities; they contain. All tax-districts include state and county level mill levees. Additionally there are college, and weed & pest mill levy. Finally the entire county is broken down into one of three school districts. However at this point the mill levees start to differ. Next further mill levees are added for cities, towns, or fire districts. Lastly special districts have assessments applied to them. The reason for emphasizing tax districts is they provide the ideal unit for understanding; how the tax dollar is being spent and how taxes are accrued with respect to property. The goal being suggested here is to create the resolutions, ordinances, and statutes to ensure the real-time access to line item accounting of tax-payer dollars. More on where to start and some initial objectives to come.
Precincts can be broken down into blocks and streets. The value of doing so is it allow for at least one means of authenticating and verifying voter input. If consensus statements are the goal than the objective would be once a month to publish an official consensus statement for each precinct in the county. To incentivize participation resolutions, ordinances, and statutes should be created to prohibit the spending of tax-payer dollars on items without consensus support. Further priority should be put on items with the greatest degree of agreement. For example: what percent of registered voters in any given precinct want tax dollars to go to road maintenance, water & sewer maintenance, government housing, rezoning, the west corridor, more bureaucracy, more administration, non-profits, and new infrastructure? What percentage of voters want a balanced budget and no public debt? What percentage of voters want to be an employee verse thier own boss? What percentage of voters are looking for an opportunity to start a local business? Does a consensus of voters exist that support creating a level playing field for economic opportunities in our county? Does a consensus of voters exist to create a limited local government that minimizes taxation and seeks to ensure an informed citizenry? Comments on possibilities for how to achieve this to come.
Provided the existence of monthly county consensus statements created by combining each county's precinct reports, then a dialog on state statutes and bill proposals is an easy lift. More comments to come.
First, prove a service or product is viable. Then open the service or product to the question: should this be funded by the taxpayer or the market place? More on service or products that need investments to develop, to come. Specifically, what is being proposed is for locals to be able to compete to provide the services and products used by our local government. Examples include database services for public data including hosting of the County and City GIS services as well as the County and City websites. Furthermore providing the accounting software management and processing of the taxpayer's dollars and pennies. It is being proposed that the data and data processing should be separate areas of focus is Sheridan County for each tax-district. The goal with respect to journal entries and transaction records of the taxpayer's monies should be publicly available in real-time. This will allow any person to process the data by their own means. By passing resolutions, ordinances, and statutes that explicitly state the form and expectations for how the tax-payer's monies are to be accounted for, so the possibility that an ongoing forensic audit is possible. In this way a minimal cost to the public is ensure while the amount of fraud, abuse, and waste is mitigated through public scrutiny. With respect to collection of data on government spending, a resolution, ordinance, statutes need to be passed to ensure that line item accounting provided by the seller, in a designated machine friendly format, is mandated.
If the citizenry's agenda is clear and concise, then identifying electeds acting counter to that agenda should be obvious. Creating the means to replace such electeds with voter vetted candidates seems a reasonable objective. This could be accomplish by the same means as that used to produce consensus statements. Think of it as a special case of the general consensus process. General consensus statements are ones of intent or limitations places on government. The special case is a formal decision-making event by the citizenry outside of an election. To ensure acceptance of the results the process must be open for all to verify. The easiest means to do this is to make the list of registered voters public by precinct and tax-district and then publish the vote of voters. It has been suggested that an initial goal would be to create a consensus statement once a month; however regarding public meeting of the County and City their regular meeting or roughly ever other week, so a consensus statement on the off week would be the best opportunity for the citizenry to participate in the process. For the apt reader, the use of technology and the determination of how long a vote remains valid may be of interest. The technology side of the question is one for the market place because it involves an exchange of effort on the part of the provider. This is complicated by the need for the ability of voters to participate without incurring fees. More on this to come. As for the validity of a vote, once a consensus statement is finalized, any updated consensus would be considered a new voting process. Should reoccurring statements, ever become a thing, this process would need to be reviewed.
Real-time access to line item transactional data for all tax-payer pennies. To the current treasurer: start today how much data can you provide on a daily basis? What is your plan to achieve the objective before the end of your term? To the voter: is this reasonable? To potential candidates: how could you do better?
What is the least expensive means to administer and assess property taxes? Could square footage be part of the assessment? Is it your job to fund the government? Does an explicit list of all taxes applied to each county parcel exist?
How are plea agreements decided? How can legal system be made more transparent to the public? Could our laws be review and prioritized with respect to speedy processing? Could you provide review and opinion of the investigative standards used by local and state law enforcement?
Public records; accountability; fair legal system; speedy system; review and sun-setting of legal congestion
Starting with a registry of, currently available, services and products for locals, let's develop consensus policy to incentivize local commerce and small business. From that development we can evolve policy to promote the expansion of local markets to state, country, and world markets. Some fundamentals to consider. Taxation is a deterrent to individual behavior, so taxation on income does not make sense aside from a last ditch effort to create revenue for the government. Taxation applied to consumption does make sense. First in addresses the issue of waste by the incentivization, minimizing taxation, for more efficient consumption methods and discouraging excessive consumption. Property taxation is an affront to personal liberties especially when applied to use cases. With respect to property taxes the goal should be to apply acquisition based property taxes to eliminate public debt and then repeal taxation based on property. With respect to consumption of space, a square footage tax could be considered for land and buildings. Debt free with a balanced budget for all our local government entities should be the policy, if a level playing field for local diverse economic development is the goal. This goal can be achieved by minimizing regulations and creating policy based on consensus support, and maintaining a debt free balance budget government.