Curmudgeon's Corner
cur-mud-geon: anyone who hates hypocrisy and pretense and has the temerity to say so; anyone with the habit of pointing out unpleasant facts in an engaging and humorous manner
Presidential Visits
How will the President’s visit to Menomonee Falls today affect you?
When the President of the United States travels, the rest of us in those areas usually are affected, and not in a good way. The security employed, for good reason, is like a heavy blanket that simply ties up normal life.
If you’ve ever visited Washington, D.C. you’ll probably remember hearing sirens and then seeing a stream of limousines and heavy SUVs move through intersections that have been barricaded for quite some time leading up to the passage of vehicles. Washingtonians are accustomed to this aspect of their lives. Those of us in the hinterlands are not accustomed to it.
People with flights out of or into Milwaukee will likely be affected as the skies are kept clear for Air Force One. People commuting from one place to another in the metro area and especially in the Falls/Germantown area will likely find themselves involved since the President is visiting a business located in the Falls. Deliveries of goods by FedEx or UPS or common carriers will probably be affected. All the normality of our daily lives is subject to disruption when a president travels.
While the details are highly classified, we can be certain that high security is being maintained and that all our local law enforcement units will be involved in one or another ways.
The costs to local communities may or may not be covered by the federal government. I suspect that it is not at all uncommon for these things such as overtime, planning sessions, etc. to go unreimbursed. The taxpayers ultimately will pay in one form or another; if the federal government were to reimburse the expenses, our federal taxes will have paid that cost. If the communities involved were to be forced to absorb these added costs, the residents of the local communities would pay for the costs.
When presidents travel it seems that the federal government should always cover those costs since that spreads the cost across all taxpayers in the country, and since our sitting president should be about the business of all citizens in the country. I fully expect that there will be significant costs to our local communities that will not be reimbursed, though. I hope we’ll be able to get a handle on those costs after the event has concluded and planning and operational costs can be revealed.
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