A century ago, con men got away with selling the Brooklyn Bridge to immigrants looking to buy a piece of America and get rich quick. The swindle became standard shorthand and joke for gullibility.
Today it’s no punchline. Mayors and governors staring down massive budget gaps are putting bridges, buildings, parking lots, and more up for sale. Who’s buying? Wall Street, which, in turn, wants to sell off your public assets to investors with the promise of sure-fire returns. Sound familiar, too good to be true? It is. But with layoffs and severe public service cuts looming, the prospect of fast cash – whatever the long-term consequence – is intoxicating. And politicians are drinking it up. Read more »
A misleading campaign has begun for a San Diego ballot measure that would reverse a decade of CPI progress for workers and their families, including the Living Wage Ordinance.
City Councilmember Carl DeMaio, with funding from contractor groups, is collecting signatures for a November ballot initiative that would force privatization of city services and make San Diego the only city in the U.S. to ban Living Wage laws.
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Within one year after President Obama signed the Recovery Act, almost a billion dollars has been invested in the San Diego region. A large chunk of the money has gone to the Camp Pendleton, Coronado and UCSD. However, even if you are not on base or campus, it is highly likely that you have been touched by the Recovery Act. Major public works construction projects have benefited from this spending, including the four-lane expansion of SR-76, construction of I-905, and the HOV lanes on I-805. Future funding has already been allocated to the construction of Otay Mesa crossing, the Oceanside transit station, and the high-speed rail to Los Angeles/Sacramento. And the Recovery Act funding is going to flow into our homes, in the form of solar panels and weatherization.
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If all of San Diego’s 2,800 miles of paved streets were laid in a straight line, they would stretch across the United States. This road would be illuminated by 40,000 streetlights, and punctuated by a traffic signal or beacon every 1.5 miles.
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With Peter Dreier
California is broken — and broke. Its K-12 public schools, roads, levies, aqueducts, parks, and bridges; its health-care system; home health care for the elderly and disabled; and even its once-envied public universities are all crumbling from long-term neglect and underfunding. State employees have been forced to take three unpaid furlough days per month — equal to a 14 percent pay cut.
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If there was an animal to describe the mayor’s state of being in the State of the City address, it would be the tiger. Probably an old Siberian tiger marking his territory, whose growl is resonant, whose diet is stray stag (and occasionally a wild boar), and whose beaming bulk awes its privileged audience. Not only that the tiger is an apt animal for welcoming the Chinese year ahead, but that it epitomizes the valiance and the vanity in the show this week.
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Revising history does not solve the revenue problem at City Hall. Nevertheless, San Diego City Councilmember Carl DeMaio attempted to do just that Monday by factually disputing that the City collects less revenue than comparable cities.
In response to a presentation of a draft Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR) for 2009, DeMaio objected to a statement about San Diego’s relatively low taxes and fees that he suggested was ” … just cut-and-paste from the Center on Policy Initiatives … I find this to be a factually inaccurate statement. I cannot vote for the CAFR with that line in it.” (Audit Committee, January 11, 2010)
The Center on Policy Initiatives (CPI) has raised the issue of the city’s low revenue for years, and has been validated by numerous independent sources.
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A Superior Court ruling upholding the legality of the San Diego school district’s Project Stabilization Agreement is a victory for efforts to revive the economy through creation of local jobs.
In a ruling issued December 12, the court held that the PSA, an agreement between San Diego Unified School District and local building trades unions, is legal and is not discriminatory against nonunion contractors. The court flatly rejected a lawsuit filed by the Associated General Contractors of America.
The PSA ensures that the investment of public dollars to build and renovate schools will also create local jobs that that lead to middle-class careers. It includes provisions to place local residents in apprenticeship jobs.
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The talk about the city going into bankruptcy to solve its budget woes is as flippant as talk about a family going to Las Vegas, so they can pay off their grocery bills. With a revenue stream of more than $1 billion annually, a pooled investment portfolio of $2 billion, and a tax-base with healthy GDP of over $50,000 per capita and rising, San Diego has few excuses.
The painful cuts to city services over the past three years would be akin a family starving itself to save dollars and cents, so that someone can go to Vegas to gamble it off.
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New CPI study finds construction training programs key to economic recovery
CPI released a report today linking quality apprenticeship programs in the building trades to the future of California’s green economy and economic recovery.
The report, Construction Apprenticeship Programs: Career Training for California’s Recovery, demonstrates that apprenticeship training is most effective when run collaboratively by labor and management.
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As large-scale fires become a regular phenomenon in San Diego, we need to test the strength of the umbrella of public institutions providing local fire-fighting resources. Over the past three decades, this protection has been damaged in multiple ways.
First, Proposition 13 halved the collections of property taxes, which most fire districts relied on. No longer able to float general obligation bonds to pay for needed fire facilities, fire agencies had to backfill by cutting service levels. Proposition 13 imposed an insurmountable two-thirds voter requirement for approval of taxes that specifically funded firefighting. This is remarkable since Proposition 13 itself did not meet the two-thirds threshold.
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Reform that rewards insurers could be worse
In recent weeks, orchestrated outrage and loony scare tactics have drowned out the most basic fact about health reform: The status quo is far more frightening.
High and escalating costs. Rationing of care. Restricted choice. Long waits for care. Even “death panels” (read: insurance claim-review departments). Our private insurance system imposes all this already — on people lucky enough to be insured.
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The bottom line is that businesses in San Diego pay the least for license fees among any of the cities for any type of business, at an average of a fifth of the average paid by businesses in the 10 largest cities in California.
Growth of business generates a demand for city services such as police, fire fighting, libraries, parks and road maintenance, for which the city cannot raise revenues except through a ballot measure. The post Proposition-13 dilemma that the city faces is to either stop business expansion, or undergo an expensive and politically charged election.
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One of the most significant embarrassments of public service is transparency — the government truly does not have much to hide behind. Transparency is the ability of anybody, anytime to peer into the privacy of any public employee, which is unparalleled in the private sector. Everything from how much the employee makes, to how she does her work is public record. The naked intrusiveness of Public Record Act (PRA) requests in regular business would make major corporations and their executives blush.
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National healthcare reform has been kicked around for 60 years, becoming more urgently needed each year it is delayed. As it escalates, the health insurance crisis continues to cause great suffering, crippling personal costs and a tremendous drain on the national economy.
Yet, the rightwing chorus is again bombarding this year’s efforts to reform health insurance with a time-worn, two-note mantra:
1. Why the rush?
2. If government is involved, we’re all doomed.
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