Infrastructure projects more important than kids?

To the editor:

“There is an attitude that in this environment of fiscal restraint, we should not be looking to expand services and expenses,” from Mat-Su Borough Mayor Larry DeVilbiss’ Fiscal Year 2015 preschool budget veto.

Fiscal restraint? Over the past four years, mayoral and assembly “open for business” policies have increased private-sector freedoms and compensation at public-sector cost.

The mayor has consistently used public time and money to further assembly cuts to borough operations and services while initiating, expanding or continuing expenditures on currently unjustified ventures, including the port, rail, bridge, ferry, an economic development corporation the assembly can’t legally create, and roads and town sites planned on recreational land, wildlife habitat and protected watershed.

Staff work directed to these projects, questionable code rewrites, and other unproductive elected body endeavors, has further diluted operations and services for taxpayers, while notably unsettling the private sector. Known contracted studies, reports and similar public expenses, absent meaningful results, are over half a million dollars. The current year amended budget projects a spending excess of $25 million.

How does $350,000 for children’s benefit and society’s gain compare to these examples of the mayor’s own unsuccessful targeted expansion of services and expenses over millions of dollars — particularly when this preschool investment could be paid by reinstating the very business taxes and fees and redirecting the speculative public expenditures that have so dismally failed to pay off?

Patty Rosnel

Palmer