Politician Archive

We're only a rank 2 city on Starsider Dantooine and have had three people leave since instituting a tax. A whopping 2000 credits per week. Stinking chicken feed, even a noob can run deliveries and make that in 30 min. But people still do NOT want to pay it!!!

We have spoken with 5 other mayors/city officials and they also have NO TAX!!!

PEOPLE DON"T WANT TO PAY TAXES in a game DEVS!!!!!

What are we to do? Tear down our city?? Pay all that money ourselves? We can pay it, but it's gonna HURT!

I'm sorry, this really is sort of funny

Everyone wants <insert>, but no one wants to pay for it.

You can insert just about any civil items (Fire department, roads, street lights, shuttle ports, cloning facilitys)

Your job as a politician is to convince them they are doing thier civic duty by contrubiting a small share. Have you tryed other forms of taxes? 2000cr might seem to much to them, have you tired 7% property tax?

Do some work and break it down.

If your maintenence is 100k and you have 20 people then 100k/20 = 5000 per person.

Tell them they have to pay 5000 a person to keep the city going. They have to do it some way. We have four options, income tax (max of 2k, can't understand why), property tax and sales tax, and shuttle fees. You need to come up with the 100k, 200k, 300k, 400k, (every week it will likely get bigger) per week somehow. One way could be a rich player donating the amount every week. Another way is to share it equally, but it has to be done somehow.

If not, just let the city whither and die. They obviously don't want it. They seem to pay their other fees without complaint, maintenence on their houses, 100k for that spiffy new armor, etc. They need to pay for this too.

Send them an email. Explain what I said above inserting the actual figures. Put it on them. "How would YOU like to do this?"

Ask those people to examine the big cities on Starsider. If they are anything like the ones on Tempest, they operate on Taxes. We have 1k Income, 10% Property, 100c Shuttle, and 1% Sales and the city is getting about 420k a week income. We have about 80 people, and maybe 20 of them are active crafters/Miners.

Taxes are NOT evil!! Like someone else above said, if they want <perk>, how do they plan on paying for it? There is no GameShark available. It sounds to me like your only option is to join a larger, better establised city.

One of the Cool things about Cities is that the 1st generation of Mayor have started reaching Master. Once they do, they can begin to bring up other Politicians. So maybe the Mayor turns over the city to the new Politician, and offers his/her services to a city like yours? You would benefit greatly from having an experienced Mayor in your little Outpost, and that Mayor may be able to draw citizens to your city. Imagine an Outpost with the Research Specilization.

The issue probably isn't what the tax is, but how it was implemented. If you have a community discussion on it, and make people come up with ways to finance the city, tax levels to set, etc... they'll be much less likely to leave. Even if they don't likewhat you go with then,they got a say. That has a lot to do with people's attitudes to things. A 2K tax they agreed to is always preferable to one that just appeared.

You might find though, they'd simply prefer the other sorts of taxation to be used in preference.

The way I did it was to start with telling the citizens what the cost is per week, and starting with a very low tax. Explain that you'll increase it until you either break even or until people make enough voluntary donations to cover the cost of the city. I'll just say donations started rolling in VERY quickly for us.

~~Shabhaii, Mayor of Tombra, Naboo
www.cityoftombra.com
The REAL BT
(Still looking for a good quote to replace my Charlie one)

Each week, I do a state of the city mailing to all citizens covering topics of note.

I also include a detailed expense report and income report (well as detailed as I can break it down).

This clearly lets everyone know how much it truly costs to run a city (ours is 250k wk) and it does have to come from somewhere. We did start low and slowly raise to 1k income tax.

If you have crafters, even a small sales tax helps, ours is 2% but adds up.

Thanks for the tips everyone, we'll give it a go and see what happens