DEKORNFELD: But nothing would prepare him [James Massey] for what he would find in Von Ormy because all those classes were about building city government. And in Von Ormy, the sole goal seemed to be the opposite.
This is from “The Liberty City,” episode 945 of Planet Money, October 18, 2019.
The whole thing is interesting and, at times, hilarious.
How Von Ormy, Texas started as a city:
DEKORNFELD: Art [Martinez de Vara] told people, look; San Antonio is a growing metropolis. And in the near future, they are going to try to annex us, and that will come with big city taxation. And you know what it won’t come with? Representation.
FOUNTAIN: Or, Mayor Art says, we could see the writing on the wall and come together and do this our own way.
DEKORNFELD: He says people were into it. So he circulated a petition, brought it to a county judge, and the judge ordered an election.
FOUNTAIN: The vote passed. And just like that, they went from being this unincorporated stretch of land to being the city of Von Ormy.
Martinez de Vara wanted taxes and regulation to be as low as possible.
One of my favorite passages:
FOUNTAIN: For example, Mayor Art heard about a neighboring town that had a police car that they were about to decommission. So Von Ormy asked if they could have it.
MARTINEZ DE VARA: It didn’t last a full year.
(LAUGHTER)
MARTINEZ DE VARA: But it lasted long enough. And then eventually, I know they would park it on the interstate to let people know, and it would just slow people down.
Mayor Martinez de Vara refuses to raise taxes to pay for a sewage system (the locals use septic tanks) and so James Massey quits his job.
Liberty for me but not for thee
Here’s the bad news. Don’t tax locals; instead “tax” people passing through:
FOUNTAIN: You’re expecting that you guys are going to quadruple your traffic fines.
MARTINEZ: This is what we expect to get next. And that’s why we don’t borrow money unless we have to. And we don’t have to right now.
FOUNTAIN: Are you guys turning your city just into a speed trap, where you tax nonresidents, but you don’t tax residents? It seems like that’s…
MARTINEZ: OK, if you’re driving by here and you’re going too fast, you get a ticket. It happens everywhere, not just here.
HT2 regular reader Alan Goldhammer.
READER COMMENTS
Jon Murphy
Oct 21 2019 at 11:57am
That seems to be the attitude in Florida. I’m headed to Fort Lauderdale for the Southern Economic Association meetings and there’s a 19% hotel tax. And, naturally, such measures are extremely popular with the voters.
But, more direct to the quoted passage, New Hampshire traps folks from out of state all the time in speed traps. One of the worst-kept secrets in the state is “If you have a non-Hew Hampshire plate, you had better not go above the speed limit.”
Grant Gould
Oct 21 2019 at 12:16pm
Of course if you drive at or under the speed limit you are “driving erratically” or “not keeping pace with traffic” and they’ll pull you over for that as well.
Jon Murphy
Oct 21 2019 at 1:46pm
Yeah, that “driving erratically” statute is very vague
Mark Z
Oct 21 2019 at 5:29pm
In some cases, technically separate enclaves within cities can subsist on speed traps if they’re lucky enough to have a stretch of highway.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linndale,_Ohio
With just a few hundred yards of freeway (and a slightly lower speed limit than the adjacent stretches) this community funds 80% of its budget with tickets.
nobody.really
Oct 21 2019 at 2:00pm
Our nation has had a long tradition of this dynamic: Affluent people declaring their own taxing zone so as to hoard their tax revenues for themselves, to the exclusion of the poor neighbors whom they hire to mow their lawns, etc. Google Sundown Towns.
Indeed, we observe that the affluent white citizens in the suburbs of Baton Rouge have just voted to organize themselves into a new city, St. George. One explicit purpose was to keep their kids out of Baton Rouge schools, which predominantly serve children of color.
This tradition came to full flower in St. Louis. In 1948, SCOTUS would rule in Shelley v. Kraemer, 334 U.S. 1, that the government could not enforce St. Louis’s restrictive covenants excluding black people from white neighborhoods. But the white neighborhoods had long been an institution, tucked closely next to communities of black servants. And outside the city limits of St. Louis, the suburbs divided themselves into 88 postage-stamp-sized cities that financed themselves by ticketing traffic going by. Perhaps by coincidence–but the Feds concluded it was by design–these cities disproportionately ticket people of color, charge them for their tickets, charge them court costs for enforcement of the tickets, charge them for having payment plans for the tickets, charge them interest on the balance as part of the plans, and eventually jail them for failure to make all the payments.
Why did the Feds study this? Because in 2014 this came to a head when the police killed an 18-yr-old black man, Michael Brown–and the City of Ferguson erupted into days of riots. Financing your government via traffic tickets might seem costless–but it proved costly for Ferguson.
Matthias Görgens
Oct 23 2019 at 7:53am
Why do people always get so up in arms about enforcing speed limits?
Wouldn’t you ideally want speed limits (and laws in general) enforced? Especially with modern technology, speed limit enforcement shouldn’t even need a human. A completely automated system can measure speed and send the tickets.
Now, complaining about speed limits being too low, I can get behind. But what limits you have should be respected. That’s the whole point of laws.
Jon Murphy
Oct 23 2019 at 8:25am
There’s a difference between violating the spirit and violating the letter of law.
Law, for it to be respectable, must be consistently enforced and apply to all people. Further, law should not frustrate the just actions of individuals, at least not without a good reason. The law on speed limits are meant to keep people safe. When they are recklessly enforced not for the safety of people but for tax revenue, the nominally respectable law in reality becomes disrespectful.
Matthias Görgens
Oct 25 2019 at 5:17am
Grumble that the limit is set too low for the goal it’s trying to reach.
(Extending from what you write, assume that goal is some reasonable tradeoff between not killing too many kids and not inconveniencing drivers unduly.)
Comments are closed.