San Diego's "Financial Free Fall" (Los Angeles: insurance, homes)

[AnUnidentifiedMale]

This is from a story in the L.A. Times about San Diego's budget problems - but also how some people are actually happy to see the city being starved to death financially.

"They probably don't realize it, but the skateboarders fit firmly within the local political zeitgeist, which holds that government services should be free or low-cost, even at the risk of public safety.

This, after all, is the city where chronic underfunding of the Fire Department was seen as contributing to the destruction of hundreds of homes in the 2003 Cedar fire. The Police Department has fewer officers per capita than almost every big-city department in the country.

But it is also the city that is firmly anti-taxation and where, for example, single-family homes do not pay separately for garbage collection, thanks to a law passed in 1919.

Now the nation's economic free fall may force the City Council, including newly elected members, to decide whether San Diego should change its fiscal ways or substantially slash services."

Full story here: In San Diego, financial free fall -- and freedom - Los Angeles Times

[worldlyman]

Yet that same goofy city's police department can spend the time AND manpower to set up repressive checkpoints just to stop people and see if they have driver's licenses and insurance like some Nazi-style state. Those things, even if b.s., are good mechanisms for increasing revenue for the city.

[Oerdin]

AnUnidentifiedMale, that is an excellent article which succinctly sums up the city's problems and confirms what several of us have been saying for some time now. Thank you for posting a link to it.

[ontheGtrain]

I'm in favor of the city cutting services. A lot of people are losing their jobs or making less money. Jacking up taxes is not the answer. The only thing the city really needs to do is keep hiring cops and fire fighters. Everything else is on the table and should be cut big time.

[Oerdin]

It's hard to justify yet more service cuts when we already have less then half the policemen and firefighters of other cities our size, our schools have much larger class sizes, and the roads are a mess because the city doesn't have the money to fill potholes. Let's face reality here. San Diegans are cheap and don't want to pay even to maintain existing services even at their substandard levels. People seem to think that the city magically has tons of cash but is secreting it away and wasting it, well, by and large that isn't happening. We just are unwilling to pay for decent police or fire services and so we end up paying 10-15 times that amount every time there is a wild fire. Seriously, last year we spent $70 million on wild fire clean up because we wouldn't spend an extra $3 million for firefighters and fire engines. It's a penny of prevention or a pound of cure and either we're smart enough to recognize that or we keep paying through the nose for our stupidity.

[AnUnidentifiedMale]

Oerdin, I strongly agree with what you've said. I'm hoping that the increasingly progressive-mindedness of the city and the City Council will lead to higher standards in public services and more reliable sources of income than what San Diego has now. If San Diego wants to avoid looking like L.A., it's imperative that they figure out a way to do this.

[Oerdin]

Besides the proposed fix doesn't amount to "jacking up taxes" by any stretch of the imagination. We're talking about charging households $10 per month for trash and sanitation services which people currently use for free. The fix is so small and so easy it is almost a joke but San Diegans still refuse and expect public bills to get paid by the magical money fairies.

[NYSD1995]

As long as $10 a month is "Jacking up taxes" this city will forever be structurally broken. The fact that the fire tax parcel didn't pass... that seems to have closed the door on San Diego as ever getting out in front of it's own problems. This is a city content to import it's water, power, and fire services from LA... while simultaneously trashing LA at every opportunity. LA's built a subway and is now building a city-owned wind farm... what has San Diego built in the past 10 years?

[scarrier]

You have to be aware of the fact that the LA Times ALWAYS goes out of its way to trash San Diego. For many years they try to dig up as much dirt as they can about SD, and blow it up twice as big as it is. They love to see SD having ANY kind of trouble! Take everything they say about San Diego with a grain of salt.

[AnUnidentifiedMale]

Originally Posted by scarrier

You have to be aware of the fact that the LA Times ALWAYS goes out of its way to trash San Diego. For many years they try to dig up as much dirt as they can about SD, and blow it up twice as big as it is. They love to see SD having ANY kind of trouble! Take everything they say about San Diego with a grain of salt.

Really? I've seen stories about SD in the L.A. Times that are quite favorable to the image of the city. If you're talking about the fact that they sometimes report the financial problems of the City of SD, well, that's just reality, that's not bias.