How to spend Other People’s Money when you are running short of other ways:

Declare there is a crisis.

“There really is no other more important issue facing us right now,” Mayor Donna Deegan told an attentive crowd at an environmental symposium.

The issue is climate change. It has been happening for millions of years but suddenly it has become a crisis to those on the Far Left, who hope to use it to increase the power of government exponentially.

Deegan already had a “chief resiliency officer.” The hiring of the bureaucrat took place under the pseudo-Republican administration of Lenny Curry.

Once you have a crisis and have hired a bureaucrat to fix it, you need a plan.

Resiliency is one of the ways government will save us from being baked.

Wherefore, the bureaucrat brought forth a plan: Resilient Jacksonville, a 294-page report to solve the crisis.

The next step is to implement the plan, Deegan said.

“It will be a whole-of-government effort,” Deegan said. “It will now be the foundation of everything we do as a city.”

In addition to defending the city against hurricanes, flooding, rising seas and extreme heat, the plan will help protect Jacksonville against growth.

The resiliency officer acknowledges that growth is good, expanding the tax base and bringing new jobs, cultures and perspectives.

But it can strain resources.

That means politicians would have to use common sense to maintain and expand infrastructure as needed.

But Deegan’s vision goes much further. Much. She intends to provide social and business equity.

Aye, there’s the rub.

Equity, of course, is part of the trifecta of the Far Left, along with diversity and inclusion.

It means government consuming individual liberty and freedom of choice. Everything is to be based on skin color and the socialist vision of how life ought to be — and constitutional safeguards will have to be erased.

The plan goes into detail about the racial makeup of the city’s population, as if the weather cared about that trivial factor.

It uses the fact that Jacksonville is a seaport to note that if the seas continue to rise there will be receding shorelines — not only at the oceans but also along the St. Johns River and its tributaries.

In March 2021 a special committee of the City Council issued a report on resiliency after months of examining the potential problem. It recommended the obvious need to avoid flood damage. Except for a segment where Council Member Matt Carlucci said, “All three hazards were examined through the lens of land development and environmental justice” there was little about the need to reshape society.

The “new” plan cleverly morphs from addressing the obvious need to prepare for hurricanes and floods into the climate alarmism of the Far Left. This, somehow, calls for eliminating poverty and bringing about universal prosperity.

This is the promise of socialism. It is a promise that never has been fulfilled and in fact has been a catastrophic failure in places such as the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela.

The way to counter flooding is to abandon buildings in areas that are being encroached and not continue building in them. Individuals are more than capable of doing those things where private property is involved.

As for extreme heat, what is the government going to do? Provide free air conditioning for every home?

The local government already is planning to spend billions of dollars to eliminate septic tanks, even those that are functioning properly, and hook up every home to sewer lines at no cost to the homeowner. This is supposed to fulfill some mythical “promise” made a half-century ago by someone to someone.

We can safely predict that poverty, which is not caused by weather, will not be eliminated in Jacksonville by the end of Deegan’s first term and that she will use that fact to insist upon being re-elected so she can “finish the job.”

Meanwhile, among the questions no one seems to be asking: Are Jacksonville taxpayers going to give up a billion dollars to build a new football stadium only a few football-field lengths from a river that is rising at an alarming rate?