We have lived in Baxter on Scenic River Drive for more than 13 years without city water and sewer. It has worked pretty well, but the promise of city water and sewer has been present since the very beginning and looked like something to look forward to. It was to be just a matter of time for it to reach us. Parts of the project were even begun soon after we moved in, but somehow it never got to us and was continually put off.
Baxter, like other communities, was always open to new development and new businesses, negotiating agreements and tax concessions to encourage those expansions. Meanwhile we, the ordinary people who had come to be a part of the community and not as a money-making proposition, seem to have been forgotten or put on the back burner.
Finally, after all these years of procrastination, we are told it will be our turn. The only catch is that it will now cost the individual homeowners tens of thousands of dollars to become a part of a larger community who have benefitted from those services for years and to whom we have paid our taxes for years.
We all know that the wealth of Baxter as a community rules it out of qualifying for much outside financial help. So it is not that the community cannot afford to handle whatever it deems a priority, it is that we who have lived here for years as second-class citizens are not deemed important enough for the entire community to finally include us as full-fledged citizens by stepping up to defray much more of the costs and make it affordable to correct a long term issue.
Let's find a way for Baxter to solve this issue as an inclusive community.
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Bob Passi
Baxter
