As the country slides into what many expect to be a difficult and prolonged recession, The Journal News is reporting that the City of New Rochelle is planning to increase taxes, increase park fees and reduce services.

(Finance Commissioner) Rattner and other city officials have been working on ways to find new money sources in light of the city's shrinking revenue streams over the years. A public hearing on the proposed $150 million budget is set for 8 p.m. Dec. 2 at City Hall. The City Council is expected to vote on the budget during its regular legislative meeting Dec. 9.

Among the cuts is reducing trash pick up to once a week and raising the fees for Omnicards to access to parks.

In ranking the city among the best places to raise kids in the United States, Business Week magazine describes New Rochelle as "the suburban home of Rob and Laura Petrie in “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” is still a relatively affordable place in ritzy Westchester County. New Rochelle is an ethnically diverse place with a bustling downtown and a mix of single-family homes and apartments."

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This will be our first time enabling the forums feature in the software we use to run Talk of the Sound so bear with us if we have some growing pains.

Each blog post already has commenting enabled but some readers prefer threaded discussions like the old-fashioned usenet groups so we are going to offer both - whatever folks want to bring more voices into the dialog about our City.

To get things rolling we've created an Education section with a forum on inequality issues such as the collective punishment topic, the 15 minute lunch topic.

It is always a risk due to spammers but we are going to open up the commenting a bit and see what happens.

As of right now non-registered visitors to this site can add comments to a post. The catch, the comments go into a queue and have to be approved so they could take anywhere from a minute to a day to appear the site.

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