[jrm4]

Sorry this was annoying and messy for you, but I look at many other countries and on balance this doesn't sound too bad, and certainly not "broken or incompetent" as if the US was on the verge of collapse because of things like this.

If anything, this sounds like a system working, and you doing a bit of whining. Yeah, there's political game playing, that's called the price of localism and democracy.

[sinecure]

A city breaking the law for decades by paying the school district illegally and no one doing anything about it out of fear of getting bad PR for their election campaign... or mishandling property assessments for 8 years are all pretty huge examples of incompetence and are not something I expect in a first world country.

It's the exact opposite of the system working. It's people being given power because of their party rather than their qualification and it indicates a greater sickness in politics in which we have become binary sports fans rooting for our team no matter the cost or quality of the candidate.

To be fair I have no clue how broken property taxes are in Europe or Japan or other first world places, but this ordeal was eye opening to me having grown up assuming our local governments were held to a higher standard.