A New Deal for L.A. — City Workers Pay the Bill for Their Pensions and Health, We’ll Pay to Fix Our Broken Streets

The youngest and newest members of the City Council — both cops of a sort hailing from the sprawling city’s farthest extremes with the safest seats in town — were ordered to step forward as sacrificial lambs with yet another another tax on the woebegone citizenry.

In a closed system like the City Hall political machine, Officer Joe Buscaino and Reserve Officer Mitch Englander were in no position to refuse orders so they obediently proposed the city ask voters in the May runoff election when turnout will be diminished to approve issuing $3 billion in bonds to fix the city’s streets crumbling and potholed as they are from slurry-covering and lack of repair.

Taxpayers, owners of property specifically, would pay the full cost of this plus interest, knowing full well that huge chunks of the money will never be used to repair the 8,700 miles of streets that City Hall allowed to deteriorate to such a dismal condition over the last 25 years, knowing full well that the money for maintenance of infrastructure was given away no strings attached to the usual array of special interests with most of it going to inflate the wages and benefits of city workers.

The streets belong to us — actually the Corporation of the City of Los Angeles but no need to quibble unless we’re going to break apart L.A. into manageable pieces — so it is right that we should pay to fix them.

After all we elected the people who looted the treasury, chased away good-paying jobs, replaced the middle class with poor people with enormous needs for health care, education and social services to name a few, needs that have largely gone just as unmet as the maintenance of the streets and sidewalks.

So let’s make a deal.

Property owners will pay to fix the streets since we live and work here and would benefit from pavement that looked as smooth and safe as they have in Glendale, Burbank, Pasadena, Santa Monica, Culver City, to name a few adjacent towns.

But there also needs to be a comprehensive measure that makes every city employee personally responsible to pay to fix the pension and health benefits unfunded liability that runs into the billions of dollars.

Doesn’t that seem fair?

They get to pay the bill so they can continue retiring at 55 with pensions of 75 to 90 percent and high quality lifetime health care and we get to pay for streets that destroy our car’s suspension systems.

Of course, they won’t propose that or any other deal that actually solves problems and is fair to all.

Anybody who even suggests a fix to the continuing fiscal like former Mayor Richard Riordan did only to be humiliated by that failed comedian Herbie Wesson doing his best to imitate Chaplin in the “Great Dictator.”

In putting the most regressive and reprehensible tax of all — a one-half percent increase in the sales tax to an astronomical 9.5 percent on the March primary ballot — Wesson has made it clear that he and his control union dominatrix Maria Elena Durazo believe they can get away with anything.

And with the likelihood of a City Council comprised of no one except eight failed state legislators, five mediocre political staffers and two ex-cops overseen by another failed legislator in Mike Feuer, another ex-cop in Dennis Zine and Greuel-Garcetti in the mayor’s office, there is no hope for the future of Los Angeles.

That’s what is so disturbing about seeing prominent people who know better lining up behind one or another of these nobodies without courage or vision.

And the rest of us? What are we going to do about it? Bitch and moan to each other?