Mayor Chuckie getting ready to take knife to budget
So of course when the economy took a nosedive in 2008, and city revenues with it, Chuckie Baby didn’t see it as a problem. He saw it as an opportunity to cut, cut, cut baybee.
So what’s the outcome? Well: Lots of fired cops, so that the San Jose police won’t even take reports about burglaries. There are fewer officers on patrol today than there were in 1980, despite the city having half a million more residents now. San Jose is now a burglar’s paradise. They just wait for you to leave, then steal everything you have, and there aren’t enough cops to even take reports on it, much less do anything about it. And… 43% of the workforce at the city sewage plant has left because, after Chuckie Baby cut their wages and eliminated their pensions, why should they stay there rather than work for more money for other cities or for private enterprises? Meaning that the city is at extreme risk of swimming in its own shit, since the majority of the city’s sewer system is at or below sea level and if those lift stations don’t work, the toilets run *backwards*.
So how well has Chuckie Baby’s austerity cuts worked for San Jose? Read the above and figure it out for yourself. San Jose is turning into a crime-riddled shithole (literally). That’s what austerity does to cities, yo. And San Jose ain’t no exception to that rule.
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
San Jose was a crime ridden shit hole clear back in the 80′s when I lived there. It must be REALLY bad now…..
Welcome to austerity-land, America. Anti-government types thought it would just mean that poor people starve to death and old people die of treatable illnesses. But it also means that when the anti-government type’s house gets broken into and he’s not standing there with a gun to shoot the burglar, then the cops won’t give a rosy rat’s ass about it. Austerity — where you have to have someone with a gun in your house at all times to prevent thieves from ripping you off! Freedom!!!!
I notice from the linky to the sewer plant story that the missing workers are being replaced by staffers who get paid overtime, and temp help that will get HUGE salaries:
The total annual rate for salary, benefits and overhead would come to $270,400 each for the electricians and $239,200 each for the instrument control technicians. That’s about 30 percent higher than the city’s total cost for its own instrument control technicians and 46 percent higher than for its electricians, said Ashwini Kantak, an assistant city manager overseeing the plant.
WTF? Is this being done so the city won’t have to pay retirement benefits at some time in the future, so it would rather pay $200,000+ a year to an electrician now?
Amerikkka — the most powerful nation in the world, committing slow suicide just to prove that “you aren’t the boss of me!”
Richard Belzer stated it very well the other night during an interview, “America is on a bus headed toward running off a cliff, the difference between the Republicans driving and the Democrats driving is that the Republicans what to drive at 100 miles per hour and the Democrats are only wanting to go 30 miles per hour.”
Sounds like San Jose is on the bus doing the 100 miles per hour with nothing but clear sailing ahead.
‘Nucks, for most of the past two decades San Jose was the safest big city in America. Until Mayor Chuckie slashed 1/3rd of the police force. No, you’re not reading me wrong, HE FIRED 1/3RD OF THE COPS! Because clearly if it was the safest big city in America, there were more cops than needed. (Cue eye rolls).
Bukko, if we were talking about anybody but Mayor Chuckie, I’d be wondering what crony of his got that contract. But in this case, the city council overrode Mayor Chuckie because they weren’t interested at *all* in swimming in their own shit. Not that the contract mercenaries will help when a lift station goes down and they have no idea where that lift station is, much less how to get it back online…
Harley: And of course the libraries are being shuttered, and the firehouses are so poorly staffed now that it can take firemen from four firehouses to put out a fire, and around 1/3rd of the street lights in some parts of town are out, and … uhm, WTF is the purpose of city government if not to provide exactly those basic services? But I suppose that’s the point. Mayor Chuckie isn’t a Republican, but he’s a modern Libertarian-inspired conservative, and I guess he believes that private companies will take up the job of fighting fires, maintaining street lights, pumping shit out of neighborhoods, and so forth. Ideology fail, dude..
All in all, I am *so* glad I didn’t buy that house in San Jose two years ago…
In Berkeley, snobs that we were, we never thought much of SJ. “low rider country” was the current frame of mind. My Sister now lives there, well Los Gatos, same thing to me, suburban SJ. I have a different view now.
Sad to see the beginning of the end like this. Knew it was to be but thought we had a little more time. Guess Not.
I appreciate your desire to move. Again, good luck getting out.
w3ski
Without doing any more reading, I’ll guess that people’s taxes actually didn’t go down, despite all this cutting. Regular people, anyway.