Last Tuesday, our county dragged all of us registered voters into the polls for Proposition Lifesaver. Wait, not all of us, only 1,908, or about 15.5% of us.

Now, this Proposition Lifesaver sounds good by name, doesn’t it? But let’s take a little closer look.

PL was created by our ambulance district – they want to build two more substations in other parts of the county, one North and one West. And, of course, this would have required a tax raise for us based on how much our property assessment is. So a person owning a $100,000 home would be paying $40 more a year. It doesn’t sound like a lot when they talk about it in cents per dollar, but when it becomes dollars and yearly dollars and every year dollars… it really adds up. This is also the third time, that I remember, we’ve voted on this and every time, the people have said NO.

But it’s for the ambulances, you say…

Yes… but what they don’t tell you is that apparently the wonderful State of Misery Missouri has pretty much ordered our assessor to up everyone’s assessments this year anyway. So they will be getting more tax money from us anyway! They want us to “bend over” twice now.

And to top it all off, there were signs all over town asking you to vote yes for Proposition Lifesaver. In other words, if you vote no, you hate life! I really hate when things are one-sided like that. Can’t they just call it Prop A or 1 or something like they normally would?

Well, out of us 15.5% of the people that actually got out and voted that day, 760 (39.83%) voted yes and 1,148 (60.17%) voted no.

I kind of don’t blame the 84.5% of us that didn’t vote. Afterall, they drug us to the polls for only this one issue. They can’t get it through their thick skulls that we don’t want it. I mean, seriously, if more of the people voted against it in the general elections, you think it’s going to win this time around? Especially if they’re going to coerce us into more tax money from our assessments anyway!?

Sheesh. Politics.