General
The more things change the more they stay the same
We are living in a time of change. Redevelopment Agencies in their current form have disappeared. No one knows what the State budget will look like until the voters weigh in on temporary tax increases in the fall. Everyone is still trying to figure out what their new normal is for Sales and Property taxes. [...]
We’re All In This Together
Let’s jump into the “wayback machine” and travel back to 1975 when I was a 23 year old Administrative Analyst (i.e. “punk”) with a fresh new BPA working at my first government job, a well established city in the eastern San Gabriel Valley. With my C.E.T.A. tattoo firmly imprinted on my forehead and my “Whip [...]
The Costa Mesa Experiment
As you probably know, the City of Costa Mesa has pink-slipped nearly half of its employees. Considering that as of yet none of those pink-slipped employees have included firefighters and only eight out of the existing 139 police positions were involved, you understand that the cuts primarily came from the ranks of the General Employees [...]
To Outsource or not to Outsource
In these days of budget angst and woe you may be getting pressure from your elected officials or community to outsource services that are currently provided by City staff. But will this actually save the City money while providing the same level of service to the community?
Keeping Budget Problems in Perspective
I’m writing this on March 18, 2011, or seven days after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake rocked Japan followed by a four meter tsunami that devastated the City of Sendai followed by a still unfolding nuclear disaster as the plume of radiation has finally made it to the West Coast. While we are cutting our budgets [...]
Capitalism and Local Government
One of the many nice features of our capitalist system is the ability to vote with our dollars to get the products that we want in the market place. When we go into a grocery store, we have many choices in the products that we buy and we can buy one item or many. The [...]
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