What can we really afford?

The last couple of weeks in Youngstown could have you confused as to what the community can afford.

I’m puzzled for sure.

In six days of March, three iconic music acts played sold-out shows – drawing about 15,000 fans who paid an average of $100 per ticket.

That’s approximately $1.5 million in ticket sales.

This week, Mahoning County commissioners beamed with pride as plans proceed for a new $3 million dog pound in Austintown.

And Mahoning taxpayers approved $4 million for a new levy.

It’s an amazing cash outlay for just a couple of weeks – and that’s excluding St. Patrick’s Day festivities.

Contrast that with a lunch meeting I had last week.

Lunch was with a group of businessmen whose business is managing the behind-the-scenes money of other businesses. Some of the best insight comes from such people who get to see under the hood of Valley operations.

During our meeting, we discussed the coming-and-going of the shale boom, and what was left behind.

I asked what’s replacing shale? What are the next shining stars in local business expansion? What is about to explode next?

Their response was just muffled sounds – the ones you made as you explained the D on your report card. That was followed by shoulder shrugs that suggested nothing exciting was on the horizon.

Summing up the insiders, I was left with this conclusion: Local businesses are doing swell even if they are just holding on.

So take those sentiments and ponder the news in Friday’s Vindy: Our five-county region continues to be among the nation’s leaders in population loss.

Since 2010, we’ve lost about 3 percent of our population. In real humans, that’s 16,000 people from the five counties. That continues a trend spanning decades. Mahoning County alone is down about 30,000 people since 2000.

That brings me back to the March madness of money expenditures and the pondering of what we can afford.

My concern for our taxes, regular readers of this space know, precedes this March.

In the past few years, new taxes and fees have taken more than $20 million a year from Mahoning County residents.

This month, it was $4 million annually for a new senior-citizens fund.

In November, it was an added $1 million for Mill Creek MetroParks.

The year before, it was $2.8 million for Children Services.

We signed away $8 million in new county sales taxes.

Half a million dollars in bed taxes got plucked from hotels.

And fees for water and sewers are each going up about 5 percent a year for all in the county.

These are taxes at the county level. Just about every local level has added school, street, emergency or other taxes. Some have added more than one.

I bet a smart numbers person could add up all the new taxes approved the past few years since 16,000 left the Valley and come to an annual number north of $30 million just for Mahoning County residents.

The ones who are still here, I mean.

Some of this new spending comes back to voters. Only the increased water and sewer rates and the bed tax were out of taxpayer hands. Every other above tax hike required a majority of citizens to vote “yes.”

And we did.

Maybe we can afford it.

I mean, thousands of couples shelled out enough for 90 minutes of music over six days to cover lots of road paving and school building.

Or do you believe the muffled noises and shoulder shrugs of business experts who work behind the scenes with other businesses and say it’s not a good picture?

To me, it comes back to a need for government bosses to lead us down the right path, and voters to ultimately decide the amount of faith to place in them and the taxes they push to the ballots.

Less is doable in government.

At the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County, they restructured last year with a levy request that sought $1.3 million less from taxpayers. And now they are working with local municipalities to consolidate libraries over the coming years. It’s a painful, but necessary, reflection of what the current Valley population needs and can afford.

An immediate reaction from one town official was that a town is nothing if it does not have a library. But I think that’s a line from the 1940s not supported by current trends. Heck, even Las Vegas is parting ways with Elvis, and who would have thought that?

I wish the library’s pragmatism was shared more throughout government. The glee of the new county dog facility is not pragmatism.

The current dog facility is underwhelming; thus there is a need. But the county’s Oakhill office complex is half full, and millions in taxes are already into it to make it the home for county services.

With such a situation, it’s puzzling how county bosses can rationalize spending millions to build any new facility.

Maybe they know something about what we can afford that runs counter to what the business experts say or the 16,000 lost residents show.

Todd Franko is editor of The Vindicator. He likes emails about stories and our newspaper. Email him at tfranko@vindy.com. He blogs, too, on Vindy.com. Tweet him, too, at @tfranko.