welcome guest
login or register

7th of March 2015


Comments

Our village road is about 1.4 km (a bit less than a mile). Road maintenance costs are paid by regular users, with some taxpayer money from the municipality. Our road has 20 regular users; 7 homes and the rest are mostly summer cottages. One of the local families takes care of the practical maintenance work - doing some work themselves, and buying additional work from nearby farmers who have suitable machines. I'm the accountant for our road, doing double-entry bookkeepping for all the yearly costs and payments. I also calculate the payment for each road user - there is a rather detailed formula how to divide the total costs for all the users according to their usage.

So, this is kind of a combination of "right wing" and "left wing" system - the munincipality support money covers some 40% of the total costs. And then every user pays according to a formula "the more you use the road, the bigger share you pay of the total costs".

Every second year we have a general meeting of the road users, where we agree on future plans, decide the budget and payments, and elect people to run those plans. Although, there aren't that many people to elect from, so I guess this bookkeeping is going to be my duty for years to come =)

Our country's biggest problems ever came from too much of a centralization (IMO). And I really like the way it works in Finland. Aside from utopian dreams of anarchistic society without money and exploitation, this model seems to suit people well enough.

.. or it's just a wild optimism :)

The world needs some optimism =)

Pages

Add new comment

CAPTCHA
Please reply with a single word.
Fill in the blank.