Milestones
By Miles H. Barber

In a move that defied gravity, our Santa Clara City Council voted 7-0 in the last meeting of 2011, cut pay levels for Unit 10 (dispatchers) in Santa Clara.

While this vote may be the first no vote on City pay increases in nearly a decade it does begin to set a more realistic tone in the atmosphere around City Hall. It is also a reflection of the times and may be a tip off to what may be coming as negotiations with the nine remaining bargaining units continue.

Along with holding the line on salary adjustments, the Council chose to deal with the ballooning public employee pension problem by reducing payouts and increasing retirement age.

It may be time we realized that when Social Security was enacted and social benefits were being negotiated for public employees in 1933, the retirement age was 65 and life expectancy was 61.2. Today life expectancy is 76.6.

However, these “adjustments” will not be effective until all bargaining units have completed negotiations and agreed on these changes during 2012.

Last year, several million dollars was allocated from our general fund and sent to CalPers to subsidize the shortfall incurred by excessive pension costs for City employees already retired.

This subsidy is expected to increase by millions more each year for Santa Clara.

And the bottom line is? We do not have the funds to meet this growing liability.

Even if the economy made a U-turn and picked up speed in a positive direction, the increase in projected tax revenues have already been allocated (spent).

Since the economy appears to be struggling with a recovery, there is no quick fix. We will need to tighten the belt for everyone.

While we have a group of dissidents in the community complaining about the stadium deal and the loan negotiated for its construction they are focusing on the wrong financial issue. The billion dollar loan to the Stadium Authority and the 49ers will create thousands of jobs with tax revenue and a rental stream of income to repay the loan.

Frankly this group should be looking at our public employee pension liability for past, current and future city employees. This is an obligation that produces no revenue and requires we take funds from city services to meet its carnivorous demands.

The WEEKLY has discussed this topic rather often over the past three years as the economic peeling has come off the banana and exposed the out of line benefits, salaries and pensions of our public employees.

While our city employees are great people, work hard and provide a wide range of services for our citizens, each of us must ask the question, can we continue to afford these levels of compensation to our employees?

With every city service under financial pressure, our general fund being tapped by the State and our reserves non-existent the answer must be in the question.

Who is John Galt?