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 | | | | | A City Cries Fowl | | | Our columnist looks at a Pennsylvania suburb’s ‘332 Fund,’ which asks residents for a donation that the mayor emphasizes is ‘the approximate price of a McDonald’s Happy Meal’ | |
| | | Jan. 6 — And they say that New Jersey has an inferiority complex. Well, the Garden State is positively well-adjusted compared to the city of York, Pennsylvania. | |
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FACED WITH A gaping budget hole, the city’s new mayor is asking residents of the nearby suburbs to each donate $3.32—“the approximate price of a McDonald’s Happy Meal,” he keeps emphasizing—to allow the cash-strapped city to avoid deep cuts to the police and fire departments.
The logic, of course, is that suburbanites are a giant calf sucking at the teat of urban America. Suburbanites enjoy all of the benefits of city life—the museums, the symphony, the better movies, the exposed brick coffee bars, the greater access to pornography—yet contribute nothing in the way of taxes. Hell, the out-of-towners even enjoy police and fire protection whenever they go to the theater.
For years, New York City was smart enough to soak the leafy interlopers via a small tax on any income they earned in the city. Unfortunately, the suburb-dominated state legislature killed the tax last year, blowing a $500-million hole in the city’s budget.
Despite this, however, the city is not planning to follow York’s lead in trying to turn suburbanites into philanthropists. “It’s perfectly reasonable to ask those who benefit from services to help pay for them, but New York City has no plans to pass the collection plate,” a spokesman for New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg told NEWSWEEK.
But York Mayor John Brenner has no such qualms about his “332 Fund.”
“We call it the 332 Fund because if every resident of York County over the age of 18—we don’t want to get the kids—contributed $3.32, which is the approximate price of a McDonald’s Happy Meal, we would be able to maintain the same level of police and fire and rescue services this year as last,” Brenner told me, yet again hitching his city’s wagon to the fast food giant’s artery-clogging star.
In further evidence that politics makes strange bedfellows, the mayor will even hold a rally under a set of golden arches this week with that ultimate political gadfly, Ronald McDonald. Raising money for his city is nice, but if Brenner really wants to solve an important urban problem, perhaps he could look into why his longstanding McDonaldland counterpart, Mayor McCheese, has been unable after all these years to apprehend an unsavory character known as The Hamburglar, despite the mask-wearing crook’s poor choice of camouflage and his resistance to striking any other targets save hamburger stands.
Brenner needs to raise $720,000 to hold the line on budget cuts—and in less than a month, he’s already raised $72,000, with checks pouring in from “civic-minded people who care from the heart about the city,” according to Brenner. (Would these be the same civic-minded people who have fled York in droves? The city has lost 30 percent of its population since 1950, after all. Most of them are probably thinking that $3.32 is a small price to pay to assuage the guilt of abandoning their city in pursuit of lower property taxes, better schools, cleaner streets and mind-numbing homogeneity.)
You may remember hearing about York, Pennsylvania in the news recently. This was the city where the mayor—not Brenner, but his predecessor Charlie Robertson—went to jail for his role in the murder of a woman during a race riot in 1969. As you can imagine, York’s civic fortunes were not exactly enhanced during the mayor’s trial.
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National media coverage of the “332 Fund” has helped Brenner change the focus away from Robertson. Whenever another media outlet publishes the “332 Fund” address—City Hall, P.O. Box 509, York, PA 17405—more checks (payable to The City of York, if you please) come pouring in from all over the country.
Most of the attention focuses on Brenner’s continued reference to the purchasing power of $3.32 at the local McDonald’s. CNN even called Brenner’s effort the “Happy Meal Appeal,” but to me it sounds more like the civic equivalent of standing on a street corner with a sign that reads “Will Govern For Food.”
But whatever you think about it, don’t be surprised when a city near you starts begging charitable donations during these tough times. (Are times ever not tough, by the way?)
Private museums, symphonies, arts groups and non-profit organizations have long been adept at shaking the tin cup at would-be philanthropists. But public panhandling is the hottest thing to hit government since the lottery.
Last year, the public authority that runs the Golden Gate Bridge discovered that $5 tolls weren’t enough to balance the books, so it installed boxes on both ends of the scenic span for visitors to deposit donations.
A bridge spokeswoman called the plan “an opportunity for people to share their caring” while a member of the authority board called it “humiliating.”
Imagine how much harsher he would’ve been if he’d been forced to host a photo-op at a local McDonald’s standing next to a guy with ketchup-red hair, bleached skin and clown shoes.
Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His Web site is at www.gersh.tv
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