Need for new parking lot shows city hall getting too big

One thing about government that seems universally true is that it only keeps getting bigger. Just look at the city of La Crosse. The ranks of La Crosse city government continue to grow. The city has 17 department heads, way more than most similarly sized cities. We have so many employees in city hall, there is no longer enough room for them all to park. So the city is prepared to spend a million dollars of our money to build a new, bigger parking lot at city hall, primarily to benefit the police department. Maybe if we didn’t create all these new departments, and utilities, we wouldn’t need a bigger city hall parking lot. And Mayor Kabat wants to continue to make city government bigger. He is proposing expanding the street department, adding employees to get more of our roads fixed, as part of his next budget. The Mayor is right to make fixing our roads a priority, but do we really need more employees to get it done? Can’t we reassign existing city employees? Let’s be honest, not all of them are that busy. It can be easy, in times like this, with a growing tax base thanks to lots of new development, to continue to grow government. But times won’t always be this flush. Just because we have the money to spend on new employees, doesn’t mean we should. Our government is already big enough.