Last week, I tweeted about Miramar landfill being the first municipal landfill in the nation to receive ISO 14001 certification. I was quoting the city from its own website, and was expressing concern that the request for qualifications for privatization of the landfill did not include the certification.
The Miramar landfill Environmental Management System website had the following statement in bold-face (see this screenshot):
“The Miramar Landfill is the first municipally operated landfill in the nation to earn ISO 14001 certification of an Environmental Management System!”
Today, the Miramar landfill website has been changed. There are no links to the Environmental Management System from the department’s homepage. And if you do type in the URL, the statement above has been removed.
This week, even as we celebrate the 5th anniversary of San Diego’s Living Wage Ordinance, special interests are ramping up a stealth campaign to kill the Living Wage.
City contractors and developers are pushing a deceptively named ballot initiative that would repeal and outlaw the Living Wage Ordinance.
The Living Wage Ordinance is under attack! Don’t give money or your signature to the misnamed “Competition and Transparency in City Contracting Initiative.” 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.
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When Mayor Jerry Sanders wanted to reform city government, he turned to what he believed was an effective tool of market capitalism – competition. He claimed that pitting government workers against private sector companies would generate savings for the city.
Sanders, not an ideologue, grabbed on to “managed competition” so he could privatize city jobs and show his conservative backers that he was one of them. If it resulted in turning middle class city jobs into $12 an hour jobs without health care, that wasn’t his problem.
Now the debate about the effectiveness of public-private competition is at the center of the coming debate on health care reform in Washington.
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Last month, two Pennsylvania judges pled guilty to accepting $2.6 million in kickbacks to send teenagers to the two private detention centers. One judge secured the contracts for the firms to house the teenagers and the other judge kept the centers filled by sentencing enough teens.
The judges, as part of their secret “placement guarantee agreement,” sent hundreds of teenagers to detention facilities for minor and often questionable teen offenses. One high school student was sentenced to three months for mocking her assistant principal on a spoof MySpace page.
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