The City of Springfield says no one has applied to its new program to award a kind of tax break to those who minimize runoff from their properties. (The city’s often forced to process said runoff as sewage, an expensive proposition.)

Like very few others, I read the credit manual from cover to cover. It has people paying a $50 application fee for the chance to save an average of 6 cents a month. Even the guy in charge of the program said he understood why people weren’t applying. My story posted the question: why write a manual at all?

I can understand trying to “protect the revenue stream,” as the city says, but a lot of our readers thought this went above and beyond.