Following the money

In today’s Gazette, we present a feature we have wanted to write for several months. It’s one of those important-but-not-urgent issues that kept being pushed aside by squeakier wheels. A relative lull during the holidays finally provided an opportunity to step back and address a subject that has been quietly complicating public conversations across the community: how government projects are funded and how easily those mechanisms are misunderstood.

That confusion became especially visible during two recent attempts to pass school bond initiatives, one in 2024 and another in 2025. Organizers in both efforts expressed frustration that they were contending not only with voter skepticism but with misinformation circulating in the less thoughtful corners of the internet. Complaints in social media threads routinely lumped together a school bond issue, a sales-tax-funded recreation project and a privately funded YMCA proposal. Distinct projects with different funding sources were consolidated into a single grievance, creating misconceptions that bond proponents were then left to untangle.

That said, the confusion was understandable. At the time, more development projects were moving forward simultaneously than McCook had seen in decades. Public facilities, private investments, infrastructure improvements and voter-approved initiatives were unfolding simultaneously, each with its own funding structure and decision-making process. Even attentive citizens could be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed.

City staff, in particular, have borne the brunt of this frustration. Long before the bond votes, the community’s complaint-page regulars had already earned a reputation for being especially unforgiving toward municipal employees. Street repairs are second-guessed from behind windshields, snow removal is judged from living rooms and trash collection is analyzed with the confidence of seasoned public works directors. The volume of opinion is high, the information level less so and city staff have learned—often quietly—to absorb criticism that comes with the territory, whether or not it is grounded in reality.

More recently, city officials have expressed concern that property taxes are routinely conflated with voter-approved, optional sales taxes–especially online. That misdirected animus can undermine public support for otherwise beneficial projects.

Make no mistake: we empathize with young families and first-time homeowners trying to absorb all this information under considerable pressure. Those of us with a bit of gray at the temples have had decades to digest these systems incrementally, yet even now, there are murky corners that require revisiting. Expecting instant fluency from residents juggling work, childcare, mortgages and rising costs is unrealistic.

It is for those reasons, and for those people that we undertook this project.

Writing the accompanying “explainer” required drawing lines, and that was no small task. When taxation is the subject, ink and paper run out long before the list of creative ways to fund government is exhausted. With that in mind, the lead story in this issue focuses on local taxes, where voters have the most direct influence, while acknowledging that federal and state taxes account for a substantial share of the overall burden. Those higher-level taxes are also frequently the source of the “free” money cited by local officials when they tell us proudly, “It didn’t cost us anything.”

Regardless of our grumblings, the indisputable fact is that taxes fund the basic services people rely on every day, from roads and schools to public safety, courts and public health. Too often, those systems and the people who keep them running are taken for granted. Our hope is that understanding how those are funded will bring those issues back into focus.