Its criminal! Ames is out of control. January in Iowa is making up for the earlier lack of snowfall with a vengeance. And the brain trust at City Hall has instituted the “2 inch” rule, the plows don’t come out with less snow than that. Its a mess, its a hazard, its a ripoff. We pay the damn taxes! Plenty of them. We pay higher than the state average in property taxes. We have a city sales tax. We have a school district surcharge tax. We pay taxes. What we don’t get are services. I blame City Manager Steve Schainker. Well, him and that idiot City Council for not firing him. Plows don’t plow, cops don’t patrol, its insane. There are few city services that affect public safety so directly as clean safe streets. Do they cut the budget for conferences? For symposiums? For training sessions that just happen to be held in Honolulu, Vegas and Miami? Only in a college town could such a high level of stupidity be reached that people find this acceptable.