[quote=The-Shoveler]Well I think this is where the City of Los Angeles
(the 800 pound gorilla in the room standing in the corner), is going to be pivotal and set precedence for the entire country IMO.
Because eventually (unless possible Fed intervention or voluntary pension and pay reductions), L.A. is going to be insolvent.
Heck they can’t even stop the 5.5 percent raise that is due in January.
We will see what transpires fairly soon IMO (my guess within 10 years)
Interesting times.[/quote]
Shoveler, the City will just “fix” it all year by year by not hiring replacements as employees retire, thus lowering their payroll expense … as they HAVE BEEN DOING in recent years. In CA, March 31 and June 30 are popular retirement dates for state and local civil servants for a variety of reasons. It’s time again for a slew of new City of LA retirees to be cut loose on terminal leave … and later, their pensions.
A much smaller government at all levels is the “new normal.” CA residents will just have to be content with LESS services going forward in the absence of agreeing to wholesale or piecemeal repeal of Prop 13 and its progeny.
For instance, I’m finding that the vast majority of residents don’t really give a damn (incl myself) if the library is only open 4-5 days per week for 2-3 hours per day. Less employees can now work in two or more local libraries to get at least 32 hours per week and thus keep their benefits. Each library can stagger their opening hours to coincide with other local libraries’ closing hours.
I just bought a *new* $45 “computer operating-system bible” on Amazon for $6.52 (including $3.99 for postage – it weighed 2.5 lbs). This is less than the library would have charged me had I accidentally kept it for two weeks past its due date, which has happened to me several times, one time of which I received a letter from a collection agency with no prior warning (to pay for a borrowed book I threw in my entertainment center and forgot about). Sure, the Amazon book took a week to get to me and the cover wasn’t completely perfect around the edges but what do I care? Now I have it handy to use it whenever I need it 🙂
I can’t say the same for the state courts. The current CA Superior Court situation is ba-a-a-ad … so much so that the “system” doesn’t really work anymore due to its severely-reduced employee head count, IMO. I feel really sorry for residents who find themselves having to litigate today in our state system. Perhaps it is more efficient in CA’s rural counties but it is terribly overloaded in CA’s populous counties and there is no solution in sight.
We can’t have it both ways … that is … 40%+?? of CA’s landowners paying 1/10th of 1% of the current market value of their properties due to artificially low assessments which will NEVER catch up to even being close to the market value and expect top-notch, responsive government agencies. It’s not going to happen because 40%+ are VOTERS and they’re not going to vote themselves into paying ten times the property tax they currently are, REGARDLESS of their ability to pay market-rate tax. And when they die, their (Prop 58/193) “heirs” won’t vote in a Prop 13 repeal, either and thus the initiative(s) will never receive 66.66% of the vote.
So what we have is essentially the longtime residents who stayed put in one residence (and their heirs) benefiting from the same local services mostly paid for by the newer residents residing in the same locale. Nothing has changed.
