It looks like this............
Nearly half the city workers in Costa Mesa received layoff notices last week. Street sweepers. Firefighters. Mechanics. Payroll clerks. Animal control workers. In all, about 210 of the city’s 472 employees, many of whom have worked there for decades. On Thursday, as the notices were being handed out, one maintenance worker committed suicide by jumping from the city hall roof.More......“It’s like they decided to blow up the city,” said Billy Folsom, 58, a mechanic who got a pink slip. “It’s devastating.”
The cutbacks are necessary because the escalating costs of providing pensions for police, firefighters and other unionized employees are draining the city’s revenue, city leaders say.
Within three years, city projections show, more than one of every five tax dollars will be spent on employees’ retirement benefits, which were made far more generous in the years before the stock market crashed in 2008.
“Just do the math — this is unsustainable,” said Jim Righeimer, the city’s recently elected mayor pro tem. He campaigned on the pension issue, eliciting anger and a counter-campaign from the city’s police and firefighters. “Under these kinds of burdens, we can’t do everything the city needs to do.”
2 comments:
It should get even more interesting. I used to live in Costa Mesa and my in-laws and sister are still there. Apparently some of the city council members are pushing to change Costa Mesa from an incorporated city to a charter city. Charter cities have fewer limitations on council salary. Hmmm, hope the good citizens of CM remember Bell, California.
What are pensions and entitlements? Essentially they are wealth transfer for the sake of wealth transfer. The government pays people simply for existing. Should that be the role of government? Or shouldn't government be in the limited role of providing services that are not easily carried out by the private sector? Police, fire, defense, FBI, etc.
Probably half of the tax dollars spent in this country are spent as wealth transfer.
When half of public spending pays for people who are basically doing nothing, its a problem. It's like when $2500 of the price of a GM car was to keep the union pension afloat. Something is wrong with that. But then remember that we are borrowing trillions to keep this all going; borrowing our retirement funds children that aren't even born yet???
Our generation will not be known as the greatest generation. We will be known as the hated-est generation.
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