Mayor Jerry Sanders visited La Jolla’s Recreation Center April 30 in order to communicate some ideas of how to solve the city’s debts with the aid of his Chief Financial Officer. The early portion of the evening was devoted to the discussion of needs for repaving streets, selling off city-owned land, keeping libraries open, replacing pipes, handling water and sewer costs, the threatened "reorganization” of the Park and Recreation Department.
People associated with Park-Rec, from volunteers to workers, had attended prior meetings in goodly numbers for fear that this department, already hard-pressed for budget allowances and personnel to attend to these jobs, would be dismantled even more. The mayor admitted the city’s earlier wrongdoing by acknowledging its lack of communication with Park-Rec workers and its many volunteers, promising that nothing would be done until more feedback from these previously ignored sources was considered.
Mayor Sanders spoke of the sources of revenue for the city. The staggering statistic that hit home the hardest, which he seemed perplexed about himself, was that for all of the property tax collected from San Diego, which would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the city got only 17 percent of it back from the state. The county, surprisingly, received an additional 13 percent of this revenue, despite the fact that the money originated from properties assessed in the city. The bulk of San Diego property tax stayed in the general fund in Sacramento, not a surprising statistic but an amount to at least some people in the audience far too excessive given the financial straits of this community. A demand and claim for a larger percentage could be one step in solving financial problems, since it isn’t completely clear nor transparent just what happens to our taxes once they reach the state capital.
However, when discussing the multi-billion-dollar pension fund deficit and costs for health insurance of retirees, despite the mayor’s not getting around in his discussion to additional costs related to the DROP program, it became apparent that the attempts to fiscally right things in the city for everyday services were greatly compromised and most heavily burdened by worrying about what city employees earned when working or upon retiring. Recent comparisons between what city employees earn and what is earned in the private sector for comparable occupations often give the nod for salary figures to public employees. The days of sacrifice for one “going into public service” have come and gone. There are too many in the private sector, especially the self-employed, who don’t earn what city employees do, who don’t receive "matching funds" for 401K retirements, who purchase insurance out of their own pockets, who have to care for their families and who try to put “something away for a rainy day.”
Yet, the greatest percentage of taxes to help defray the costs of these city services seemed to be focused now on how to take care of a city employee’s present and future. While perhaps legal because government may do what it does, the question to be asked here is: How moral or fair is it for government to force its way into the pockets of the private sector? To pay a government official’s salary is one thing, even when considered too excessive. For government to demand the additional "perks" of retirement benefits, which may in some cases exceed what government employees earned prior to retirement, all at the private sector’s expense, is on highly objectionable grounds. A greatly needed rearrangement of priorities and usage of tax revenues is in order, especially when government has obvious conflicts of interest, all of which can and usually do add to its own benefit and aggrandizement, while the taxpayer foots the bill each time. It should not be the taxpayers’ responsibility to assure a city worker his retirement, but it remains the chief concern. The shark, aka government, has gotten much too large for at least our local pool, aka San Diego. Call it the "slow assassination" of the golden-egg-laying goose. Pick your own metaphor or borrow what the Wall Street Journal called our fair city, Enron by the Sea.
” Ernie Lippe, D.D.S., lives in University City and was the Libertarian candidate for the 53rd Congressional District seat in the November 2006 special election to replace Randy Cunningham.