Snow removal last night

[http://users.livejournal.com/_mattt/]

I am going to catch a lot of flak for this, but I actually wanted to (gasp!) thank the City of Somerville for their relatively good work at clearing most of the roads last night.

I observed the roads in Somerville to be much clearer than the roads just across the border in Cambridge, in particular Mass Ave.

This isn't a knock on Cambridge, but from the warmth of my house, I was able to observe the DPW trucks making repeated rounds last evening keeping the roads open in case they were needed.

Comments

Re: This whole post? IIRC.

[on-reserve.livejournal.com]

My thought was population density = many more tax payers per square foot of road to be cleared = better snow budget.

Re: This whole post? IIRC.

[heliograph.livejournal.com]

Here's a recent official Somerville property tax number: $88 million. Somerville has a 85% residential property tax base, which is crushingly bad for revenues. Here's the link:

http://www.somervillema.gov/NewsDetail.cfm?instance_id=1135

For 2004, Somerville had $75 million in property tax revenues, while Cambridge had $209 million. That's a sizable gap. Cambridge has a slightly higher population (around 100k in 2000 for Cambridge, 77k for Somerville), but the real difference is their commercial vs. residential tax base. I couldn't find a percentage, but according to Cambridge's 2008 budget, they get $66 million in property taxes from their top ten commercial tax payers: so they get 75% of Somerville's TOTAL just from their top ten commercial payers.

Re: This whole post? IIRC.

[grapefruiteater.livejournal.com]

Higher population density probably means fewer residential properties and less tax revenue from property taxes than in a city where the population is more spread out. Just a hunch.

Re: This whole post? IIRC.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

Remember it's not assessed on a per-taxpayer basis, but a per-property basis. Yeah, Somerville has a lot of houses close together, but it also has a lot of people per house, so the high population density doesn't translate to as many properties as one might expect. Also, what everyone else said about the relative lack of commercial property to tax.