{"id":385488,"date":"2010-03-03T09:38:21","date_gmt":"2010-03-03T14:38:21","guid":{"rendered":"tag:ronkayela.com,2010:\/\/1.967"},"modified":"2010-03-03T09:57:10","modified_gmt":"2010-03-03T14:57:10","slug":"the-never-ending-story-of-the-budget-crisis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/385488","title":{"rendered":"The Never-Ending Story of the Budget Crisis"},"content":{"rendered":"
EDITOR”S NOTE:This article was originally published in the latest edition of Nina Royal’s North Valley Reporter.
<\/i><\/b>
City officials for years have ignored the fact that spending more money than they take in sooner or later leads to bankruptcy. They did it in good times and in bad, and they are still doing it in this time of the worst economic decline since the Great Depression. <\/p>\n

Fifteen months ago, the city’s financial advisers laid out the case that drastic measures needed to be taken at once. Their advice was ignored and every quarter since then, city revenues have fallen by double-digit percentages.<\/p>\n

Yet, the mayor and the City Council kept on spending like there never would be a day of reckoning.<\/p>\n

Finally, in June, without any financial analysis, they cut a deal with most city unions to pay 2,400 workers handsome bonuses to retire early. When that deal blew up and was shown to make the city’s financial situation even worse, they went back to the bargaining table and
cut a second deal that involved workers paying a little more toward their pensions, and giving up pay raises for two years with the promise of being made whole within five years.<\/p>\n

Now that deal has blow up as financially unsound, too, so we are watching the mayor and Council doing a budget contortionist act to try to get the unions back to the bargaining table a third time.<\/p>\n

They gave the unions all the leverage back in October when they signed the last deal so we have seen in a matter of days of the threat of 1,000 layoffs jump to 2,000, and then 3,000, and finally, now 4,000 — the exact number that was in their financial advisers’ report 15 months ago.<\/p>\n

If layoffs are ever carried out, it will mean the overall city work force will have been reduced by nearly 7,000, or close to 15 percent of the total. <\/p>\n

But all the cuts proposed come from a pool of less than 13,000 workers — the people who run the parks and libraries, community planning and building code enforcement, and many
other services used by all of us <\/p>\n

The truth is, they do not have a plan to fix what is broken–what they broke. Their only plan is to get through this year, and maybe next, by selling off golf courses, parking structures, the convention center and other revenue producing assets, to defer costs into future years and to borrow heavily – all steps that perpetuate today’s problems for years, even decades to come.<\/p>\n

It is a never-ending story.
<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n

\nThe moves they are making will blow up, just as surely as the ones they
\nalready have taken.
\nDramatically worse services hurt the quality of everyone’s life, the
\nvalue of everyone’s property and business. Dramatically higher DWP rates
\n coming as soon as April 1, and higher fees for just about everything in
\n the city hurt everyone, drain money from the economy, and make life
\nharder at a time when incomes are declining and jobs are in jeopardy.<\/p>\n

All that their strategy achieves is to get through this year and maybe
\nnext. They have no plan beyond when the deficit is expected to reach
\n$775 million, or nearly 20 percent of the current budget, or the year
\nafter when it goes past the $1 billion mark. <\/p>\n

This is a catastrophe in the making. Every action they are taking is
\ncertain to blow up into controversy and conflict without actually
\nsolving the problem.<\/p>\n

But it doesn’t have to be this way. <\/p>\n

There is only one way out that preserves city jobs and services, and
\ncleans up the city’s financial problems once and for all. <\/p>\n

Instead of using gimmicks and deceits as the city’s leadership is doing,
\n they need to admit they have failed. They need to bring the civic,
\nbusiness, labor and community leaders
\nto the table and talk about how we all pull together to save our city.
\nClearly, city workers at all levels including agencies such as the DWP
\nare paid more than we can afford and their pensions and health benefits
\nare too extravagant. <\/p>\n

The unions need to take a step back financially to scale payroll costs
\nto revenue. They won’t
\ndo that unless there is real job security and a commitment from the
\npublic to pay a share of the cost of fixing the city’s financial mess.<\/p>\n

A short-term tax of some sort on sales or property combined with reduced
\n payroll costs could right the ship of the city and preserve the quality
\n of our lives and our hopes for the future. Power sharing itself would
\nchange the city’s political dynamics and actually give us the
\nchance to do a better job of managing our affairs for success as
\npartners instead of as victims of a political machine that has lost the
\nconfidence of all sectors of the city. <\/p>\n

There is no other way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EDITOR”S NOTE:This article was originally published in the latest edition of Nina Royal’s North Valley Reporter.City officials for years have ignored the fact that spending more money than they take in sooner or later leads to bankruptcy. They did it in good times and in bad, and they are still doing it in this time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4290,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-385488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4290"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}