Look carefully at the above table. It contains a list of proposed layoffs offered up to city council Thursday night as a means to fill up a $33 million shortfall in the city budget.
It offers up 273 layoffs (at the bottom of the second column) to achieve the goal of about $36 million savings (bottom of the last column) to the city.
If you look at the second to last row, you will find there are 39 police positions on the chopping block. It was, in essence, that figure that brought out hordes of police officers to the city council meeting on Wednesday, and filled Alexander Library to the brim Thursday. Indeed it left many people unable to actually witness the meeting as the Nevada Open Meeting Law requires.
But more about that later. The one fact I want you to focus on at this moment is that the above table, the basis for all the gnashing of teeth in city hall, is pretty much complete and utter bullshit.
Tonight the essential lesson learned is that if you can get enough city employees to wear a brightly colored shirt saying something to the effect that Nor’Town is only 78% safe, then the city will take the very rules of mathematics, stored, immutable, in the changeless mind of God, and bend them as if they were made of Play Doh.
It probably helps if your unions are essential to the mayor’s political survival, too.
So, although it looks like, on the chart anyways, that 39 of our brave boys and girls in blue will get pink slips, actually, it will only be about 5. Somehow, the police were allowed, unlike other departments, to count people who may or may not take early retirement as not being on the force, hence their salaries don’t count against the budget short fall. That, plus some other accounting shenanigans, allowed the police to avoid the 39 layoffs.
No, don’t expect me to make complete sense of what happened. Go ask Ben Bernanke to explain it.
No other department got off so well, prompting the spokesman for the fire fighters into an angry tirade wherein he expressed shock at the fact that council spent more time discussing shopping carts than fire fighters.
Speaking of shopping carts, lots of services will be cut as well. The city will be cutting back on its shopping cart pickup program as well as graffiti removal. City leaders will be considering whether volunteers might be able to pick up some of the slack. Also, libraries and recreation centers will probably have shorter hours, and two city pools may be shut down.
The mayor insisted that she could not support layoffs for firefighters or other public safety employees. When councilperson Anita Wood suggested there could be no sacred cows in the budget process, the mayor insisted that she had never agreed to that concept. Indeed, she suggested that any councilmember who supported firefighter layoffs should agree that the layoffs be applied to station houses in that councilmember’s ward.
I suspect everyone agreed that that was a cheap shot. Indeed, among the crowd sequestered in a separate meeting room at the library where we listened to the meeting through a loud speaker because the regular meeting room was full, there was a loud, collective “woah” at the suggestion. Ms. Wood then wondered where the mayor would find the $2 million that the laid off firefighters would save the city. The mayor replied rather unconvincingly that she was “working on it.”
No doubt we can all expect more name-calling as the budget process proceeds.
Oh, and for those at the meeting who embraced the principle that “perception is realty,” try out the Latin version: esse est percipi favored by the late Bishop Berkeley. It sounds classier.
More to read, if you really want: Review Journal, LVNow.
Where are we going, and what is this handbasket we are travelling in?