Creststwood is the "best-run town in America" because it's "run like a business."
When he first became mayor 39 years ago, Stranczek promised property owners that some day the village would pay their taxes.
. . . .
Stranczek... explains it is done through a combination of privatization of village services, a friendly business climate, and fiscal restraint, all while providing a high degree of personal service.
Long before privatization became a familiar word, Crestwood was actively seeking more efficient and less costly contract providers for just about every municipal service.
ARE YOU GETTING A REBATE ON YOUR PROPERTY TAXES?
. . . .
...Crestwood, Illinois, with a population of about 12,000, is run so efficiently that the citizens that year were to receive a 26% rebate on their property taxes. Wow!
. . . .
"Businesses don't become successful by running at a loss, said [Mayor] Stranczek. "When I became Mayor we scrapped the huge Public Works Department that handled water main leaks, etc. We simply contracted these problems out to private contractors.... Thanks to efficient government, there's plenty of money to pay for needed services.
. . . .
Crestwood has just 17 full time employees, compared to a near by town of the same population that has 150 full time employees. "Our budget is $2 million dollars a year while a town of similar size, with 12,000 people, might have a budget of $10 million["], said City Director Frank Gassmere. Added Mayor Stranczek: "Folks are happy here and I intend to keep them that way."
There's only one problem in Crestwood! The municipal water is too cheap!
For more than two decades, the 11,000 or so residents in this working-class community unknowingly drank tap water contaminated with toxic chemicals linked to cancer and other health problems, a Tribune investigation found.
As village officials were building a national reputation for pinching pennies, and sending out fliers proclaiming Crestwood water was "Good to taste but not to waste!," state and village records obtained by the newspaper show they secretly were drawing water from a contaminated well, apparently to save money.
Twenty-two years ago, state environmental regulators told Crestwood's that their cheap well water was contaminated. Likely by one of the "mom and pop" businesses the mayor extolled. But Crestwood kept using the contaminated well, and kept telling residents that the water was tested and safe.
That contamination became public only after a mother kept asking why her son had contracted leukemia. State officials still claim that Crestwood's use of the contaminated water for up to 20% of its water supply caused only "minimal" risks. But "[o]ne of the chemicals found in Crestwood's well, vinyl chloride, is so toxic that the U.S. EPA says there is no safe level of exposure."
Small government. Low taxes. You get what you pay for. Perhaps we should ask the mothers of Crestwood if the property tax rebates they got add up to the value of the life of even one child.
Cheap water, privatization, lax regulation, and small government sure turns out to be expensive. But not for Mayor Stranczek; he retired a tax-cutting hero, and got his son elected in his place.
And not for the many on the Right who over the years -- see the links above -- praised Crestwood for living on the cheap. Maybe we'll see retractions from them -- but more likely, we'll see more extolling of the short-sighted penny-pinching that's given California low low property taxes and a crumbling, over-taxed, er, over-stressed infrastructure.
More complaints about "Big Government" sticking its nose into our water supply, interfering with our poisoning by the Invisible Hand. More indignant rants about how "Big Government" gets in the way of the stock market and Big Finance making profits.
Because, as we've seen, Small Government "run like a business" works.
