With ‘no direct financial incentive,’ can Burlington get telecom back on track?
“A lot of them aren’t business people by and large,” said Andrew Moylan. Moylan is a senior fellow at the R Street Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based free-market think tank who spoke with Vermont Watchdog about a government’s ability to create and maintain such a business.
“I don’t know about Burlington in particular, but (in) a lot of municipalities … these are not people who are engaged full time in operating something that has a real bottom line in terms of (having) a business aspect to it,” Moylan said.
“I think it’s really unfair both to ask of them and for them to ask of taxpayers to allow them to run these sorts of businesses when these are high stakes we’re talking about — real large amounts of money that are placed on the backs of taxpayers. From my perspective, it’s the wrong thing to do at public expense when private businesses exist to serve these sorts of demands.”
Moylan said that unlike private businesses, a government has “no direct financial incentive” to get it right.
“A private business has the incentive to get it right because if they don’t, they will go out of business,” he said. “They will cease to exist. That risk is diminished substantially for municipalities because they can always lean on taxpayers for more money to bail out whatever failing project it might be that’s causing a problem.”
