Offering frequent news and analysis from the majestic Evergreen State and beyond, The Cascadia Advocate is the Northwest Progressive Institute's unconventional perspective on world, national, and local politics.

Friday, February 5, 2010

Colorado's I-1033, recession, and miserly electorate combining to kill Colorado Springs

This is the future that we gave ourselves a chance to avoid by saying NO to Tim Eyman's Initiative 1033 last autumn:
COLORADO SPRINGS - This tax-averse city is about to learn what it looks and feels like when budget cuts slash services most Americans consider part of the urban fabric.

More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark Monday. The police helicopters are for sale on the Internet. The city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops — dozens of police and fire positions will go unfilled.
First responders, who needs 'em? Tea partiers in Colorado Springs have apparently managed to convince a majority of their neighbors that they don't need police, fire, or emergency medical response, let alone libraries, schools, and pools. Or hospitals. Or parks... Colorado Springs no longer has the money to maintain its urban oases:
The parks department removed trash cans last week, replacing them with signs urging users to pack out their own litter.

Neighbors are encouraged to bring their own lawn mowers to local green spaces, because parks workers will mow them only once every two weeks. If that.

Water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead, brown turf by July; the flower and fertilizer budget is zero.
Lovely. So much for beautification. But it gets worse:
City recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools, and a handful of museums will close for good March 31 unless they find private funding to stay open. Buses no longer run on evenings and weekends. The city won't pay for any street paving, relying instead on a regional authority that can meet only about 10 percent of the need.
I wonder if there are any progressives left in Colorado Springs who can save the city. Conservatives certainly aren't going to. No doubt they still think, even now, that their own city government is bloated and wasteful, even though it's clearly drowning in a bathtub at this point.

Grover Norquist and all his clones (Tim Eyman, Bill Sizemore) should move to Colorado Springs and buy houses next to Douglas Bruce, 'cause they're living the tea party dream down there. Their common wealth is disappearing, and with it, their public services. It's a conservative utopia... I mean, dystopia.

We up here in Washington, meanwhile, have an opportunity to be generous towards each other and our children in this Tuesday's special election. Many school levies and bonds are on the ballot, and they need our "yes" vote. We owe it to ourselves and to our children to invest in our public schools. Rejecting right wing schemes like Tim Eyman's Initiative 1033 are only half the equation.

The other half is actually stepping up to fund public services.

Some libraries are also requesting money so they can maintain service levels for patrons rather than going sod-all, as is the case in Colorado Springs.

So fill in the "Yes" ovals on that special election ballot, and be sure to mail it back in by this Tuesday, February 9th. Let's work together to keep our communities strong and avoid the fate of Colorado Springs.

POSTSCRIPT: Our favorite reaction to this post...
I currently live in Colorado. The situation is dire. I am a teacher who no longer has health benefits, has had their salary reduced by 10%, has 43 kids to teach, and will be taking furlough days. And I live in the "affluent" area. Timmy can come down here and live the vision of the American Enterprise Institute. It sucks.
I shudder to think what might have happened to us here in the Evergreen State had Initiative 1033 passed and gone into effect.

Comments:

Blogger Phil said...

Tis a pity, Andrew, that you and the reporter of the linked article refused to do decent research before blathering on about how the TABOR is killing CS,CO.

Any mention of how many of the taxpayer dollars were wasted to keep the US Olympic Committee in CS, CO? Didn't think so. FYI: It was $50 million dollars.

Maybe, just maybe, they should have let the vagrants in the USOC leave CS, CO? They'd still be 27million in the black then, wouldn't they?

Also, nice how you refused to include the bit from the linked article which spells out that the employees of the city are paid three times what those doing the same work in the private sector are paid and are kept on year-round at full-time salary even during the seasons that they're not needed.

But then, I know that full disclosure and progressive politics never go hand in hand. Ends justifying the means, and all that.

February 8, 2010 5:39 AM  
Blogger Andrew said...

On the contrary, Phil, the article was well researched. No matter how bankrupt Colorado Springs becomes, you would hunt down at least one expenditure that you claim is wasteful, and then go on and on about it. As if that would justify your drown government in a bathtutb ideology.

You riff, baselessly, about "full disclosure", but your own attempt to challenge my premise relies on nitpicks rather than considering the big picture. My post expressed my opinion; it is not objective journalism, although the Denver Post article (the basis for my post) was. I linked to the article so readers like you could read the whole thing for context.

Government is run by humans, and humans make mistakes. We're not always as efficient and effective as we could be. That fact of life doesn't make underfunding public services a good idea. The private sector is far, far more wasteful, incidentally, than government: consider all the money that insurance companies spend on administrative costs.

As for employee pay, the article doesn't say that every single city employee makes three times more than what the luxury resort executive pays his workers. It appears to be an average, and averages can be deceptive. Would it make sense for the better paid city managers to sacrifice some pay? Probably. But that still wouldn't provide the revenue the city needs. It's not a panacea. You didn't admit this, of course.

You also failed to admit that $24,000 a year is barely enough to keep a family of four above the federal poverty threshold. Doubtless many of the employees at the resort make more, but if that's the "per employee" average, it also means many employees are also being paid less. How'd you like to work at that resort? You probably wouldn't have any time to leave smart-aleck responses in anybody's comment threads.

February 8, 2010 10:45 AM  

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