The City of Portland is now so horrible of a place for people with children to live in, the city is ponerding bribing families to stay.
Portland to pay people to stop fleeing the city?
Portland schools lose more students. There’s a 20% reduction in the past decade. Only 20% of the people who live in Portland have kids in the schools and now the City of Portland is asking what it can do to keep the people in the city–the same people they’ve systematically disaffected by making the city les attractive to working families. Who’s left? Old schoolers? Liberals? Does this mean they want the Reagan Republicans back? Maybe. But here’s the story, now the city wants to pay people to stay or lure them back with rent subsidies, mortgage subsidies and underwriting mortgages through the PDC.
How did they let this happen?
By siphoning money from the general fund to pay off their union pension plans By skimming money that would have gone to the schools, fire and cops to go to urban renewal plans, or, as I like to call it, “The Homer Williams full employment Plan.” By its anti car culture by making it untenable to drive thus making little Susie’s trips to ballet, spanish, or art after school (since the schools can’t afford that stuff anymore) too difficult–try carpooling, grocery shopping, and after school activities on a bike with your kids. By making inner city housing too expensive through urban renewal and the urban growth boundary restricting supply of land Now, after all that (plus undoubtedly many more) the coupe de grace is this: they’ve reduced themselves to having to pay people to stay.
Seattle has the exact same problem, for the exact same reasons. Since 1975 there has been a 30% decline in public school admissions. Yet, oddly enough, the public education budget has doubled (using inflation adjusted numbers) and they’re asking for more money even though the district is closing schools.
But hey, ask a liberal whose fault it is and they can only come up with their standard boogeymen “Republicans”. Never mind that there hasn’t been an (R) in the Mayors office as far back as I can remember and we haven’t had an (R) Governor in decades.
You’re the second person I have read that this morning has something to say about the Union Bogeyman.
Quit blaming the public employee unions, Phil. They aren’t the problem, and I challenge you or any other conservative writer to present dollar amounts to back up your claim.
Here’s my challenge: I claim that political correctness mandates are far more expensive than the difference in all forms of public employee union conpensation from that of equal-quality, private-sector employees.
Let’s say that teachers get 15% more pay and perks because they are represented by a union, than they would get if they had individual labor contracts with the school districts. Multiply that number by the number of teachers and ESSENTIAL school personnel to get your figure of “Union fat” in the budgets.
Now, take the number of non-essential school personnel (counselors, lawyers, pshrinks, admin hacks, etc) and subtract ALL their pay and compensations. I think you will find that dumping all the feel-good people out of the educational system would be FAR more beneficial to the school budgets than cutting 15% off the salaries of teachers.
I have always maintained that if every school district hired just ONE lawyer, and gave that attorney the job of closely inspecting ALL the feel-good mandates to see which ones were possible to evade, he would more than make his or her salary back for the district.
Let’s unite and go after the real fat in the educational system workplace. Hint: it’s not in the teachers’ pockets.
BTW, the link to the original story in this post is busted.
Well George, maybe if you go through my archives, you’ll see where the public employees unions are taking tens of millions of dollars out of the Washington State budget surplus to pay for the ill concieved pension plans.
A public employee, just like any other employee, has a right to a pension they paid into, but only at the level they retired at.
Once they are no longer contributing members of the union, non-full-dues-paying, they have no right to demand pension pay increases, all of which come not out of the pension plans, but out of the state (or whatever agency they worked for) general fund.
They get what they retired at. And if the union screws up and loses the pensioners money in a bad investment deal, the union has to eat it, not the taxpayer.
How’s that?
I will not lay off the unions until they stop screwing the worker (you know, the people they claim to work for), the consumer and the taxpayer. Never. End of story.
Link fixed.
Here, try this link out
http://www.softgreenglow.com/wp/?p=1214
At that time, for some reason unknown to me now, I found it reasonable to give a pensioner more than they were bargaining getting out of the system when they retired. I was wrong then.
If you were planning on retiring with a $2000 per month pension and the union decides, even though there is not enough money in the system to pay you, to give you $2500 per month, the taxpayer shouldn’t have to cover that. The union should.
As I said then, I’m being robbed of my share of over $1.4 billion dollars in surplus taxpayer funds thanks to BAD DECISIONS MADE BY THE UNION.
Not by me, not by a vote of the taxpaying citizens, BY THE UNION.
I grew up in a small suburb of San Francisco (not real close, about 30 miles) and when I first moved there in 1st grade there were 5 elementary schools. By the time I got out of high school, they were down to 2 and thinking of closing one of them.
This was almost 30 years ago. I believe they ended up repopening one since they’ve had a lot of apartment buildings get built since then.
The big problem was the ever increasing price of housing and the tendency for people to have less children. Most of the people with school age children were younger and not earning as much money and they couldn’t afford to live there.
http://www.LouDobbs4President.com
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