They collect that tax because well to do white folks like myself drive on KCMO roads and use KCMO infrastructure but take our wages home to the suburbs and spend our money there.  It’s lopsided.

It’s not like I enjoy paying the tax but I totally understand why they do it and until the city is re-urbanized and more in balance something like that is necessary to maintain the infrastructure.  We can’t all complain about the potholes and yet not pay anything to fix them.  Cities this size have lots of infrastructure to maintain and they can’t collect property tax from the suburbanites in their McMansions if they don’t live in KCMO.

Don’t get me wrong - KCMO isn’t perfect and has some governance issues - but the root of this problem goes way back to when redlining was outlawed and schools were integrated.  White flight decimated urban cores around the country and KCMO has only in the last 20 years really started to recover from it.

So, in the interim I pay my tax as I want Kansas City to succeed.  If you have a problem with the tax then don’t work in KCMO.

Jeffrey.


On Sat, May 25, 2024 at 9:40 AM Monty J. Harder <mjharder@gmail.com> wrote:
And the property and sales taxes the city collects are somehow insufficient to fund that infrastructure, unlike literally every other municipality in Missouri other than St. Louis.  Somehow these two need to collect an extra percent of "earned" income from people who live and work in them.

The bottom line is that when considering the compensation package for a job, the nominal pay is but a part of the story.  One must add the value of benefits, and subtract the cost of taxes, transportation, etc.  The need the city has for that money is irrelevant to the fact that the worker won't be allowed to keep it.  He too can not operate on a pro bono basis.



On Fri, May 24, 2024 at 4:41 PM Jonathan Hutchins <hutchins@tarcanfel.org> wrote:
On 2024-05-24 15:26, Billy Croan wrote:
> What on Earth are they doing? I mean it's trains so like, scheduling,
> billing, signaling?

I don't know what particular project this is.  Last time I talked to KC
Southern they had a fairly small Linux team.  They were working to get
the systems that had done those things migrated from an old mainframe to
a simulation running on RHEL.

They also have a Positive Train Control project - that involves a
variety of hardware, embedded devices and such.  Also human-life
critical.

> And their location is subject to the KC MO 1% income tax I assume,
> unless they're grandfathered out of it somehow for being a railroad?

There are apparently some costs incurred in the provision of the city
infrastructure.  They can not operate on a pro bono basis.

--
Jonathan
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