Damascus Voters Could Dismantle Government!!

Damascus residents voted to become a city in 2004. That was two years after the Metro regional government included Damascus in the largest urban growth boundary expansion in state history. Those two changes meant a new Damascus city council had to draft a long-term plan for how the city would grow. Chris Hawes says regional plans to develop Damascus were flawed from the beginning. He says building city neighborhoods across the rocky hills and valleys of Damascus is so expensive, that it might never happen. And that makes city property taxes unnecessary. Dissolving the city would save taxpayers money, he argues. "The net would be a $2.53 per thousand of assessed value savings, which is about $600 or so for a house that’s assessed at $200,000.”"Metro needs to be dealt with,” says Anderson. "The city is going to be better able to deal with it. If we go back to county control, then we’re just relying on the county commissioners to make some of the decisions that we’ve already stepped through, and are we going to be happy with the people who are going to run the plan process at the county.”
www.opb.org/news/article/damascus-voters-could-dis...ment-