Declaring “we are the heart of LA,” city workers plan to rally at City Hall on Monday for a Valentine’s Day lovefest “to the city we love and the services we love to provide.”
Love isn’t all there is to this.
There is the self-interest element that city unions are trying to stave off layoffs and furloughs of their members as the mayor and City Council look at slashing nearly 10 percent of general fund spending come July 1 to eliminate a deficit of nearly $400 million.
And there is a public interest element: The 4,000 jobs already eliminated and the abusive use of furloughs for one-time savings mean drastic cuts services to the public from closed libraries to reduced parks programs to the breakdown in competent planning and the quality of emergency and public safety services.
This is the road to urban suicide, not the path to improving the quality of life for LA’s 4 million residents or creating a healthy business climate that generates goods jobs and economic opportunity.
It’s hard to believe that deep into the third year of the city’s fiscal crisis, we don’t have coherent plan to solve the problem.
This is at its heart a spending problem, not a revenue problem.
Salaries and benefits cost more than the city can afford. Tens of millions are dollars are wasted through inefficiency and incompetence from buying 16,000 new shovels to paying for a fleet of 30,000 vehicles.
The Coalition of City Unions has compiled a chart showing what they call their “love savings” — how much money that have given up in the last two years just to keep the budget balanced without the structural deficit actually being addressed (Love savings.doc).
There is a total leadership vacuum caused by a mayor who has yet to put two intelligible or intelligent sentences together on the budget and there is daily exposure of poor management by the bloated ranks of highly paid top bureaucrats.
The unions have invited the city’s elected leaders to come to the Valentine’s Day rally and listen to their demands and their proposed solutions, many of which are similar to those proposed by Ron Galperin’s Commission on Revenue Efficiency.
The city’s business and civic leaders, in the absence of any political leadership at City Hall, could seize on this opening and take the unions at their word that they want to preserve their jobs and city services.
They could begin a real dialogue together with labor and community leaders and come up with a framework of a deal that gives meaning to the mayor’s phony “shared sacrifice” and moved the city forward to a comprehensive solution to its budget problems.
Or we can just go on talking to ourselves like crazy people oblivious to the world around us and let the mayor and Council go on floundering and failing.
How about they “rally” on their own time, instead of a day when they’re supposed to be at work?
And don’t tell me they’re all going to do it on their lunch hour. Born at night; not last night.
I am livid with the Daily News. Below is a quote from their weak endorsement of Mitchell Englander in the CD 12 race.
“However, as chief of staff to a sitting councilman, Englander effectively has the incumbent’s advantage. He’s raised a campaign war chest of $444,000, filled with contributions from the developers, businesses and political action committees that bankroll elections. We expect that he will focus his energy on serving the men and women of CD 12 who elected him, not his donors.
It’s also worth noting that Smith was elected in 2003 to replace his boss, then-retiring Councilman Hal Bernson. So there’s been a line of succession of council aides in CD 12.”
They clearly state that Mitchell Englander got him money from developers, businessmen and political PAC’s, not the average citizen. Yet they go on to say that they believe he will focus his energy on the voters who may or may not elect him. What are they basing that on?
Every constituent in CD 12 should be furious over the Daily News and their endorsement of this repugnant man.
They couldn’t even find a halfway nice thing to say about him.
Those employees who are TRULY committed to providing the services might be the heart of the city; but their unions (along with all the other special interests) are more like the armpit of the city. The elected leaders who vote for those interests are the crotch of the city.
To Walter Moore @ 1:13 p.m.
Believe what you like but the FACTS are that most of those attending will account for their time. Of course, there will be some who will try and slither out of it but the vast majority will stay later or use some other method of making up the time.