With a state funding package in limbo, Portland's TriMet announced it will eliminate 15 bus routes and reduce light rail service
https://www.wweek.com/news/2026/01/05/trimet-announces-steep-service-cuts-to-close-budget-gap/
https://www.wweek.com/news/2026/01/05/trimet-announces-steep-service-cuts-to-close-budget-gap/
6 Comments
count_dongulus@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 216d
Trimet serves a particular area. Why should they rely on money from government sources beyond that area? Super irresponsible.
Really souring lately on lower governments that bend the knee to higher layers of government to solicit money for things that are just specific to that lower level of governance. IMO you either have enough money for the geographically specific services your community wants, or you don't. Change your tax policy or rethink the initiative if your budget won't work. Creative financing means you are no longer in control; the governor, state congress, president, US Congress, or whoever else you begged for money from now gets to tell you what you can do in your own community.
henchmannumber3@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 216d
Except the Portland metro area that Trimet serves is the biggest tax base and largest population center for the state. Should the state spend the money they collected from the area elsewhere instead of spending it on a large portion of the state population?
count_dongulus@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 215d
What's the point of collecting money at the state level just to hope it's allocated as if it were collected locally? State level money should be used for state level concerns that benefit everyone in a non-geographically localized way - like, state healthcare programs, disaster relief savings, state college systems, etc. Spending 50% of the money on local things in the area that gave 50% of the taxes might sound ideal, but the problem is there's nothing to guarantee this is how the money is actually spent. And it's not, as we can see with this news. The House might be proportional to population, but the senate and governor are not. And population doesn't necessarily correlate to tax contribution either.
This is the same reason we get upset at the federal level when federal tax dollars are spent on "pork barrel projects" in a state whose senator happened to negotiate their way into that money after holding some actually important budget bill hostage. The pie was so big in the first place because we've normalized giving up our autonomy to send the overwhelming majority of our tax dollars off to people who don't care about using it to help us.
IMO the tax system is absolutely backwards. Instead of county/city government getting maybe 1% of your money, the state 10%, and federal 25%, it should be the complete opposite order. Because that's the order of influence on your day to day quality of life, and the order of how much influence your vote holds.
henchmannumber3@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 215d
Not all social goods can be distributed evenly over a geographic region. Not all social goods make sense at a small scale. Springfield doesn't need a monorail or an escalator to nowhere.
It's fine to argue for a change to the taxation scheme, but if Portland contributes more in the current system, it makes sense it would benefit more.
At the opposite end, there are some social goods that rural counties can't afford on their own, so saying they should be left to primarily their own local tax base to fund things would leave them without essential services.
Otherwise you get into a right wing libertarian system with too little tax revenue and no social goods. Bears roaming the streets. People dying in car accidents because seatbelts aren't mandatory.
count_dongulus@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 215d
Well sure, nobody's suggesting some kind of 100% libertarian pay to play system. I just feel like the tax collection ratio is backwards in a way that erodes the principles of democracy, and I think that leads to conflict in a way that is a net negative for a just and stable system.
count_dongulus@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 215d
And to give some perspective, this inverted (or at least equal) tax ratio is exactly how Nordic countries, Switzerland, and others operate.