The Canary In The Mine

If a business that caters to young people cannot survive in an area popular among the young, it may be bad management, or perhaps it’s something else.

Last week Ambrosia closed suddenly, seized by the state for failing to pay taxes.  OK.  The restaurant business is rough.  The percentage that survive five years is pretty low.  Maybe it was time for new ownership or a repurpose of the site.

But now the same fate engulfs the nightclub named Ohm just fifty feet away on the next block.  This isn’t Syracuse’s south side, or the north.  It’s not the near west side which census figures show is among the most impoverished white neighborhoods in the country.    This is Armory Square, where people wear black and every hip Syracusan brings out- of-town family members for a tour of authenticity beyond the back-filled Erie Boulevard with it’s Olive Garden and Applebees.  Armory Square is our ringer, our little enclave that’s supposed to work and expand and lead the way to a brighter future for Syracuse.

I just returned from four days in coastal New Hampshire where I stayed in the home of my sister Karen and her husband Tony.  They’ve completed restoration of their 1790 home less than two miles from the Atlantic ocean.  On a home assessed at triple mine in Syracuse, they pay two thousand dollars less in property taxes, but that gap will surely grow as my assessment in this year of plummeting home values all across America spiked by $50,000.  If I could do basic mathematics I’d use the tax rate to calculate what I’ll pay next year, but I think I’ll wait to be surprised so I can shoot myself when I open the bill.  Apparently, $11,000.00 in annual property taxes is just not enough to keep this city going.  I need to pay thousands more.

Karen and Tony in their North Hampton home

It’s interesting to note that taxes claimed the Armory Square businesses, not failure to meet payroll or declining revenues which shuttered businesses all over the country since this recession began.  Taxes.  A tax official proudly proclaimed on the news tonight that his office of tax enforcement recently hired new staff members to collect on these cheats, because it’s not fair for the rest of us who do pay taxes on time.

Well I have a different opinion of who are the cheats and it’s not these guys trying to make a go of it with a business in Armory Square.  It’s the layer upon layer of useless and unproductive duplication and bureaucracy in Albany.  I’m tired of hearing New York State has terrific schools and unique challenges that make the cost necessary. Hogwash. Every rust belt state is suffering and many of them, like Massachusetts, have better schools that don’t cost as much as ours.  In New York, our answer is blow up the size of government and pass more laws so our elected officials can show they’re accomplishing something.

New England creativity. People made cottages from old fish shacks.

In New Hampshire, the “live free or die” state,  we spoke of taxes over a fine dinner of $4.79 per pound lobster and salt potatoes.  New Hampshire has no income tax, and no sales tax.  I told Karen and Tony the state makes up for the difference by charging higher fees, but they haven’t seen it.  They’ve had a big real estate transaction, they’ve registered vehicles, gotten driver’s licenses. And they have experience.  Karen and Tony have lived in Massachusetts, California and Virginia before this latest adventure in New Hampshire.  They claim the fees they pay now are no higher than anywhere else.

My sister and brother-in-law also live in what is referred to in New Hampshire as a “donor county”, which means it’s more affluent than others.  Donor counties pay higher taxes than non-donor counties, and the money is spread out across the state to help residents in the rural areas far from the ocean estates and tourist draws.  Even in a donor county, Karen and Tony find their tax burden to be reasonable.

Lively Portsmouth, host to the President's Town Hall meeting on health care two days later

In the late 19th century, before a Pittsburgh company named Mine Safety Appliance invented detection equipment to alert miners to the presence of deadly gases, they used to lower cages of canaries down the shafts.  After a few minutes the cages were brought up and if the canaries were dead, the miners knew not to descend that tunnel or they’d be dead too.

The “canary in the mine” is a phrase used to describe foreshadowing, a phrase that seems apt with the sudden closure of two well-established businesses in Armory Square.  It’s messed up to use tax money to hire tax enforcers to collect more taxes, but that’s the spiral we’re living, and no one seems able to stop it.  How about charging less tax to begin with and letting those workers do something productive like plant more flowers?

Miners never challenged what they saw in the cages. Where the atmosphere was suitable, they dug.  But where it was not, they dropped the birds and went somewhere else.

Tagged as: Ambrosia, Armory Square, Mine Safety Appliance, Ohm, restaurant, Syracuse