Quote:
Originally Posted by 1AngryTaxPayer
San Diego is upside down due to an underfunded pension system caused by secret deals put in place for years to give employee unions benefit increases in years there wasn't money to do standard pay increases.
Without fixing the real issue should San Diego Govt be given money to keep on doing what it's been doing? I'm thinking that we are going to be revisiting this again.
Is your City or County upside down due to pensions and benefits for employees?
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I live in San Diego, I was born in San Diego, I grew up in San Diego, my family lives in San Diego, and I own a home in San Diego. I've been here a long time and I pay attention to local politics. San Diego's budget problems go way deeper then your simplistic "it's all the union's fault" rhetoric. The big problem is that for 30 years the city has been run by the same Republican good old boy network who claims no one has to pay any taxes and yet magically the police will get paid, the firemen will get paid, the schools won't suck, and the roads will get repaired. It isn't true.
We pay some of the lowest property taxes of any big city in America thanks to this "we won't pay any taxes" mentality and the result is the city is ALWAYS starved for fund. We have half as many police per capita as any other top 50 city in America, we have less then then 40% of the firemen per capita of any top 50 city in America, we have some of the highest school class sizes... Name the catagory and San Diego is near the bottom of the list. This isn't a spending problem this is the result of three decades of simply ignoring the basics and letting things like parks, public buildings, and roads rot away until now it is hard to find a road which doesn't have a pot hole large enough to damage a car's wheel.
Despite this low tax environment San Diego has a hard time attracting businesses because we've ignored the basics. We need to stop ignoring the basics and invest in our future or simply give up and let the city slide into 3rd world like conditions in all but the wealthy exclusive areas. That's the course we are on now.
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