$182,000 Water Bottle – Promotion Government Style

The city has decided to spend $182,000 promoting tap water.

If you figure an average home in Southwest pays about $4500 per year in property taxes. (I know many pay a lot more.)

That means a little over 40 taxpayers entire property taxes went to tell us to drink tap water… I know it is more complex than that, but it is still true when you consider just the numbers.

How do you feel knowing you might be one of the 40 people that just paid their entire years worth of property taxes to the city just to have them use it to tell you that you should drink tap water.

Here it is the $182,000 water bottle.

A couple weeks ago on Sunday my wife and I went down to the Milk Carton Boat Races.  The companies were are giving away free promotional items, encouraging you to take extras.  Target gave us multiple bottles of free sunscreen.  They told us to take two each.  Old Dutch would not let us get away with less than 2 bags of free chips each and they were pushing more at us with a smile as we walked away.

Now a little promotion city government style.

The city was there with their promotion of drinking tap water and they were giving away free water bottles. See the above picture. These bottles aren’t cheap.  We excitedly got in line believing we can recover a few of our tax dollars.  Then we noticed they were taking each persons picture as people got the bottles. Hmm… No big deal it is a free stainless steel water bottle. We continued to wait and realized we had to take a pledge and sign our name. Hmm… No big deal it is free water bottle and we are avid tap water drinkers anyway, we can pledge to drink tap water.  To make a long story short.  They are taking your picture and cataloging it with your pledge to drink tap water and posting it on the internet…  Kid’s names and picture as well…  The city is posting your child’s photo and name on the world wide web!  (Isn’t that considered unsafe?)   Oh, and don’t ask not to be posted on the internet, my wife did and they took her water bottle back and not in such a nice way.

Anyway,  I think there are many problems with what the city is doing in this program.  The biggest problem being the irresponsible use of our tax money.

This is not what I had in mind when I included water in my list of basic services.

What a waste!