The city of Geneva kicked off budget season a couple of weeks ago with the first of many workshops to allow City Council to learn about municipal finance and discuss policy priorities that will drive the tax levy (and corresponding tax rate) for 2026.

I’d like to take some of what was said by councilors at that work session and connect the dots to real solutions they could implement if their words are sincere (which I am going to assume they are). There was almost unanimous agreement that taxes are too high and that a reasonable effort should be made to reduce the tax levy. This is not a new idea. But in discussing how to achieve that objective, the councilors — of all political persuasions — seemed to give new life to some long-forgotten possible solutions.

One idea was to charge non-city residents who rely on the city’s water and sewer services a rate that actually reflects the costs, rather than having city payers subsidize it. On June 25, 2007, two former city councilors discussed this policy change in depth on a website they maintained about local issues (it was called “No Strings Geneva: a........

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