The Prices We Pay

Today's Minneapolis Star Tribune carried a short editorial describing a chart that appears on the city of Woodbury's website. Based on a median-priced home ($288,500 market value), the chart compares the amount paid in taxes for various services to other services a middle class family might purchase in a year.

As I imagine the editorial writer expected, it sure makes taxes look reasonable (or the cost of other services look unreasonable). Here goes:

City Services		vs.	Voluntary Services
Police protection	$249		Cable TV (digital)	$628
Fire protection	$76		Cell phone (most popular plan)	$810
Parks and recreation	$108		Trash collection (65 gallon)	$227
Snow plowing/street work	$198		Dinner for 2 "out" once/month	$420
City water	$104		Large Caribou coffee 2x weekly	$194
Sanitary sewer service	$198		Daily newspaper subscription	$208
Street lights	$24		Broadband Internet service	$695
Total	$957		Total	$3182

My first reaction was a sarcastic comment about how competition and the free market obviously have driven down prices on all those voluntary services. But I imagine a dedicated free marketeer would respond that the prices of the city services would be even lower if they were delivered under a free market system. Hmmm.

It's a bit hard to compare most of these things, but there is one that we could do: the $227 trash collection fee. While it's paid separately by each homeowner in Woodbury (and St. Paul, for that matter), it's covered as a municipal service (charged back to residents) in Minneapolis.

A quick check of the Minneapolis city website found the following:

The Minneapolis trash collection cost annually is:

$276 solid waste fee
+ $24 small cart disposal fee (comparable to the 65 gallon container)
- $84 recycling credit
________________
$216

Which is slightly less than the Woodbury private hauler charges. Plus the Minneapolis residents' fees cover a bunch of additional services: two large bagged or boxed items outside the cart per week; two appliances per week; yard waste hauled away for composting; even vouchers for getting rid of excess garbage, demolition debris and tires. I know the private haulers in St. Paul don't cover any of those at the base cost. And we don't get any recycling credit, either, I might add. We do get to haul our own yard waste to a few composting sites provided by the city.

Less than a thousand dollars a year for all of the services on the Woodbury list...seems like a reasonable price to pay for clean water, streets, sewage, lighting, police and fire and parks. People really don't know how good they've got it until it's gone.