Month: October 2015 (Page 2 of 2)

Meet the American Fork City Council Candidates (Part 2)

10/28/2015 / David Rodeback

Link

Here’s a link to audio of the first candidate segment of last Wednesday evening’s meet-the-candidate event at American Fork Library:

2015_Wednesday_2

Questions in this Segment

Who are you, and why do you want to be on the American Fork City Council? (Order: Frost – Shelton – Barnes – Simpson.)
What service to the City or other experience makes you well qualified to serve on the city council? (Order: Shelton – Barnes – Simpson – Frost.)
Lots of candidates and officials say they’re for lower taxes, but what is the proper level of city taxes for residents? Is it more or less than we’re presently taxed, or about the same? (Order: Barnes – Simpson – Frost – Shelton)

Notes

Each candidate had one minute for each response. Note the response order above with each question, because candidates aren’t named before every response.

Highlights

Brad Frost is a lifelong resident of American Fork, who wants to give back. In his first four years he’s seen how complex an operation the city government is. There are projects he’d like to see through to completion, like the planned Memorial Garden at the cemetery. He wants to see American Fork prosper, and he works hard to monitor and advance the city’s image. He runs a business, is a blue collar guy. He’s a good listener. He listens to people’s problems large and small, then goes to work for them.

Rob Shelton has learned in his first four years how hard it is for one person to change the City, but he ran for office because he thought he could help, especially with his financial expertise. You need a good relationship with other city councilors to be effective. The City has managed to cut costs and reallocate resources (preventing tax increases) in many ways in recent years. He’s always been involved in the community, from coaching soccer to serving on the library board and the Utah Valley Policy Committee.

Kevin Barnes has lived in American Fork since 1979 and raised his children here. He doesn’t have a particular agenda or an ax to grind. He just wants to serve. He’s been very involved in the community, including serving in Scouting and on the American Fork Planning Commission.

Allen Simpson moved to American Fork 20 years ago and says he’s been attending city council meetings every since. He said, “I can’t complain if I don’t come.” His specialty is risk and finance, and he believes his views on these subjects would be a big help to the city. He has been active in his political party, volunteers at the library, and serves on the American Fork Arts Council.

American Fork City Council candidate Allen Simpson after October 21, 2013, meet-the-candidates event

Kevin Barnes says the proper level of taxation in the city depends on what the people want. A number of people during the campaign have told him they voted against the road bond issue two years ago and now regret that vote. They’d much rather be paying a little more money and have better roads. Small city government is about taking care of basic needs, fire, police, water, sewer, roads. He thinks our level of taxation is about right for what we get.

Allen Simpson says we have enough money. Says budget has increased $10 million in the past few years; we have enough money. Our roads have actually had a $450 million cut. [Councilman Shelton later corrected him; that’s several times more than the whole city budget, $59 million. Simpson said he meant $450,000.] So where did that new $10 million go, if we didn’t spend it on the roads?

[This is a good time to point out that for the moment I’m just reporting what they said, not evaluating the accuracy of it. — DR ]

Brad Frost looks through this lens: He thinks of people on fixed incomes, but he also thinks of our children and grandchildren. If we put some things off that we should do now, it will cost them a lot more later. A balance is needed.

Rob Shelton says in the past four years the City has made $1.8 million in cuts and reallocated those funds to other needs, such as two new detectives devoted to drug cases. We need to continue to look for ways to be more efficient with the resources we have.

Here’s a link to the next segment.

Do American Forkers Really Have the 4th or 5th Highest City Taxes in Utah?

10/28/2015 / David Rodeback

The short answer is no.

Yes, there’s a study that came out this summer, saying that the municipal tax burden on American Fork residents is the fourth or fifth highest in Utah. It used two different methodologies, which is why there are two different answers. Yes, AFCitizens and candidate Allen Simpson are passing out fliers around town touting that study.

But no, the study’s methodology is fatally flawed. And no, it’s not hard to explain.

In this section of the AFCitizens flier Allen Simpson is distributing, the thought bubble cites the bad study.

The study calculated the tax burden on residents of various cities by adding the total property and sales tax revenues in the city, then dividing that amount by the number of residents in the city. See the problem? Among other things, it assumes that the bulk of sales tax revenue collected in American Fork is paid by residents of American Fork. A little common sense should be enough to make us reject those results. Why it wasn’t enough to make the folks who are quoting it in the current city council campaign reject the study is a fair question.

I’ve talked with American Fork City and Utah State officials, and none of them knows of a credible recent study of these things, but it is widely estimated that well more than half of the sales tax revenue collected in American Fork comes from shoppers who live elsewhere. The City’s largest single source of sales tax revenue, a large auto dealership — which collects customer addresses — has reported that about 90 percent of the sales tax it collects in American Fork comes from nonresidents.

This means at least two things: The study has grossly overreported American Fork residents’ tax burden. — unless, of course, you believe that American Forkers pay as much sales tax in other cities as nonresidents pay in ours. And the candidate who is passing out the flier, Allen Simpson, either doesn’t care about the facts (because the falsehood serves his political purposes) or is not disposed to dive deeply enough into them to understand them. Either way, we have here a temperament that may be poorly suited to service on the city council.

And this isn’t even one of the hard ones.

If you have a few minutes, read the study yourself, and decide for yourself. It’s a lot longer than this post, but it’s still not long.

There’s another problem with this part of the AFCitizens flier. It’s more technical. They’re mixing numbers from two studies — adding them together — and we have no way of knowing (did they check?) whether the two studies used compatible methodologies, similar definitions, the same time frame, etc. This is almost certain to lead to unreliable results.

I agree that some things are more costly in American Fork than they should be — water rates, for one thing. We’ll talk about those, and one faction’s misrepresentation of them, very soon.

Oh, and one more thing. If you’re so inclined, please post this graphic on Facebook or link to it on Twitter. Or e-mail it to your friends in American Fork. Or all of the above.

Help us spread the word. Because good people with bad data make bad decisions.

Learn before you vote.

Meet the American Fork City Council Candidates (Part 1)

10/28/2015 / David Rodeback

This is the first in a rapid series of posts with audio and notes on what the candidates said at two recent meet-the-candidates events in American Fork. The city council candidates, that is: Rob Shelton, Brad Frost, Kevin Barnes, and Allen Simpson.

We have 90 minutes of audio from the first event (after the Pledge of Allegiance and some of the housekeeping chatter is removed). We’ve broken that into eight pieces. For each piece, we’ll tell you what questions were asked (if there were questions in that segment), and in which order the candidates responded.

Councilman Rob Shelton after the October 21, 2015, meet-the-candidates event at American Fork High School.

The first event was Wednesday, October 21, at 7:00 p.m. at American Fork High School. Sponsors were the American Fork PTA Council, led by Kelly Smith, and the American Fork Youth City Council. The Media Center (a library by another other name . . .) is a great place for such events. The turnout was moderate, about 45 people, not counting candidates and about eight people who staffed the event.

I was one of the question screeners, helping to combine related questions, rewrite illegible questions, condense long questions, and reject irrelevant and wing-nut questions. (My favorite of the latter asked how many of the ten points of the Communist Manifesto each candidate supports. I did graduate work in political theory and studied communism under card-carrying members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, among others, and I can’t list all ten off the top of my head. And the question is usually a setup for wingnuttery. And we had real work to do.)

There were several young children in the audience, which was excellent. Everyone was well behaved, with the lone exception of Councilman Carlton Bowen, who is not known for his decorum in official settings, and who isn’t up for reelection until 2017. He quite deliberately applauded his pet candidate once in the middle of a statement, even though we asked the audience to hold their applause until the end of each half of the event. What the actual children (and everyone else) in the audience managed not to do at all, at least he only did once.

Overall, the audience’s questions were relevant, and they touched on many issues.

The candidates did an uncommonly good job sticking to their time limits.

To get us started, here’s a short MP3 audio clip in which host Kelly Smith welcomes the candidates and audience and explains the format of the evening. Link to Wednesday Audio 1.

Here’s a link to the next segment, which has actual candidates.

AFelection.info: Who We Are, What We Want, and What We’ll Be Doing

10/28/2015 / David Rodeback

We realize this isn’t what everyone does in politics, but if you’re going to read the information and analysis you find here at afelection.info, we want you to know who we are, what we want, and what we’ll be doing here, so you can evaluate it properly.

Who We Are

We are David Rodeback, who’s doing most or all of the writing; and Rod Martin, who paid for the signs you’ll probably see around town, which say “Learn BEFORE you vote – afelection.info,” and who weighs in on the content and approach of these posts, among other things. Several other helpful folks have provided facts, opinions, and encouragement.

We are not affiliated with or funded by any candidate or campaign. No candidate approves what we post here. Some candidates may like it, but probably not all of them.

What We Want

What we want is simple: good local government. We think this depends on blowing away the chaff — the deception and misinformation which sometimes spreads systematically about key issues — and electing the best available candidates to the American Fork City Council and as as Mayor of American Fork.

For example, in the 2015 election cycle we want you to be able to evaluate the truth and accuracy of a report that American Fork residents have the fourth or fifth highest tax municipal tax burden in Utah. The study is fatally flawed, and the flaw is pretty obvious, but one PAC doesn’t care, and one candidate is passing around their fliers. We won’t just explain; we’ll give you a link to the study, so you can check it yourself.

When you see a graph showing (but carefully not actually saying) that American Fork has the highest property tax rate among cities in Utah County, we want you to know the full picture before you vote — because good people with bad information make bad decisions. We want you to realize that they left cities with higher rates off the graph. We’ll leave it to you to wonder why. We ‘ll give you a link to official documents with the needed information.

When they complain that water rates are unnecessarily high and blame this on the incumbents, we want you to understand the truth, which is . . . well, different.

And if you just feel like you don’t know the candidates very well, we’ll give you bite-size audio chunks of the candidates answering questions at public meet-the-candidates events. We won’t hide any of the audio — though we’ll delete some of the housekeeping, the Pledge of Allegiance, and so on. We’ll provide some notes to help you keep track of what’s going on in each chunk, such as a list of questions and the order in which the candidates answered each question.

What You Can Do

Learn before you vote. Then vote as you think best. (If you voted early, we’ll assume you knew the candidates already, at least well enough to pick three of the four with confidence. But you’re still welcome here.)

You have the opportunity to comment on virtually anything at this site. Comments are moderated to avoid spam, but you don’t have to agree with anything here to have your comment approved. You just have to be civil and relevant — and the test for relevancy is pretty generous.

If you like what you find here — or just want to discuss it more widely — please post links on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. We’ll give you some graphics to help with that.

Back to Where We Started

If you want more chatter from the same people, David Rodeback’s old blog about politics and everything else is still at LocalCommentary.com. He blogs occasionally about politics and government (not specific to American Fork) at FreedomHabit.com and about books, writing, religion, and other topics — also occasionally — at BendableLight.com.

Or drop by Rod Martin’s business, World Class Auto Repair, on Main Street in American Fork.

City Council Candidate Contact Information

10/25/2015 / David Rodeback

4 Candidates, 3 Seats

On November 3 we’ll be choosing three candidates to serve four-year terms on the American Fork City Council. Each voter may vote for up to three on the ballot, and the three with the highest vote counts win. There is no districting in this race; all candidates run citywide.

There is no substitute, in terms of conscientious voting, for personal contact with local candidates. Here are the candidates, with the contact information I have for each. (If I’m missing something, please let me know, and I’ll add it ASAP.) They’re in alphabetical order by last name, not necessarily in the order of my preference.

Kevin J. Barnes