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.
Read more »
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.
Read more »
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.
Read more »
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.
Read more »
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.
Read more »
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.
Read more »
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.
Read more »
The current economic conditions condensed into the budgetary cloud are brewing one of the darkest storms ever to threaten our city. It is the first time that I have seen revenue from property taxes actually fall. Not just fall in growth, or fall in forecasted percentage increase, or fall in share of revenue, but actually FALL, even when the cost of everything else rises. For a nearly $400 million revenue source for our general fund, a decrease of 2.3 percent is a significant dent in our ability to pay for neighborhood services.
Read more »
According to the California Employment Development Department, the San Diego region reached a historic double-digit inflation rate in June. Although civilian employment, which reflects the jobs in the economy, hardly changed between May and June, the number of unemployed increased 5.1 percent to 158,000.
Read more »
The current recession is deeper and broader than most of us have seen in our generation. Consumer confidence was at a 40-year low. Employment in retail sales plummeted, fewer tourists visited, and auto sales reached record lows, earlier this year. All of which means that San Diegans had $17 million less to spend this year on our general fund services such as police, fire, parks and libraries, than last year.
Every cent spent in this economy counts. A cent on every dollar of taxable goods purchased in the city goes to the General Fund. This is the fund that pays for services that the general public receives. The $210 million in sales tax expected to be generated this fiscal year is one of the most significant sources (18.3%) of the general fund. It is also a source that is tapped by the state to support general operations, with 11 states (including California) in the nation raising their sales tax this year in order to avoid drastic cuts that would worsen the recession.
Read more »
As San Diego County supervisors seek to privatize more services, public officials elsewhere are reading the danger signs and starting to move in the opposite direction.
Read more »
The fireworks are the most visible elements of the celebration on the fourth of July. What is less visible is the existence and role of the government that enables the celebration.
Indeed, the congregation of half a million San Diegans to participate in a public event is no ordinary feat. And there is government on display in no ordinary way. There are police patrols by foot, scooter, bike, motorcycle, ATV, car, boat and choppers, courtesy of the San Diego Police Department. There are almost two hundred lifeguards, emergency vehicles, and fire engines, courtesy of San Diego Fire-Rescue Department.
Read more »
The city attorney’s opinion itself is a legal question mark. His argument is that the majority of an electoral membership, rather than the majority who voted in an election, is required to pass something. If we held our politicians and propositions to that standard, democracy would grind to a halt. The “yes” votes on Prop 13 (People’s Initiative to Limit Property Taxation) constituted only 43% of all registered voters, in an election in which voter turnout was 69%. In the revisionist Goldsmithian logic, Proposition 13 in 1978 that is the root cause of our statewide fiscal distress, never passed.
Read more »
“San Diego is changing,” as John Lee Evans told the crowd at the San Diego Unified school board meeting Tuesday night. Developers and builders, accustomed to calling the shots here, are losing their grip in a sea change of increased community involvement and attention to the needs of working people.
Evans and his fellow board members Shelia Jackson and Richard Barrera are part of that change. They voted Tuesday to make sure the money from school construction and renovation bonds stays in the community and gives youth and families in the district a chance at quality jobs with health insurance and stable, middle-class careers.
Read more »
When I lived in North Park, I often walked by the Bud Kearns Memorial pool that is nestled in a convenient location in the Morley Field area, north of Balboa Park. It is an old building, probably one of the oldest pools in the city. Its glistening, heated water never fails to attract children playing nearby, youth in the fields, or joggers, strollers and picnic-goers in the periphery of Balboa Park. It is a charming edifice of facilities provided by the city in an accessible price-range: one of the few refuges in the heat of a penny-pinching summer. There are a variety of programs from water-polo to water-fitness offered here. Local swimming competitions, red-cross training, and swimming lessons make it bubbling with activity.
Read more »
