They want you to notice

I want to tie-in to Mad Rock’s post from yesterday on the topic of the TABOR crowd in Colorado Springs, Here is a bit of the article he links to

Community business leaders have jumped into the budget debate, some questioning city spending on what they see as “Ferrari”-level benefits for employees and high salaries in middle management. Broadmoor luxury resort chief executive Steve Bartolin wrote an open letter asking why the city spends $89,000 per employee, when his enterprise has a similar number of workers and spends only $24,000 on each.

Businessman Fowler, saying he is now speaking for the task force Bartolin supports, said the city should study the Broadmoor’s use of seasonal employees and realistic manager pay.

“I don’t know if people are convinced that the water needed to be turned off in the parks, or the trash cans need to come out, or the lights need to go off,” Fowler said. “I think we’ll have a big turnover in City Council a year from April. Until we get a new group in there, people aren’t really going to believe much of anything.”

Mayor and council are part-time jobs in Colorado Springs, points out Mayor Rivera, that pay $6,250 a year ($250 extra for the mayor). “We have jobs, we pay taxes, we use services, just like they do,” Rivera said, acknowledging there is a “level of distrust” of public officials at many levels.

The reason there is distrust is that the government thinks it’s OK to pay government employees exorbidant amounts of cash compared to the private sector and then cut essential services first. It is as though trying someone is attempting to scare the people into voting to raise taxes.

And this goes on everywhere there is a government that has emptied their pocketbooks.

I actually saw this story on Monday over at the hyper-leftist FireDogLake where one of their frontpagers is declaring disaster

This is the kind of thinking that the anti-tax crusaders engage in. Even though they know their city is going to be dark and dangerous and ugly they still can’t seem to get it through their heads that they can’t treat it like a business which hires part time people. They would rather have the second largest city in the State of Colorado go down the toilet than raise taxes even a little.

Essentially, the government wants $70 per man, woman and child in Colorado Springs to bring their budget into line. It doesn’t sound like much, but there are over 300,000 people in the city. $22 Million dollars doesn’t just disappear (unless you’re ACORN).

The city knew it was overspending and was betting that they could use the scare tactics that they whips out every five years or so to scare the people into coughing up the cash.

Thankfully, the people are standing their ground.

I hope to soon hear that they tossed out those who gambled with the budget vote some new blood in.