Good piece.

Thankfully these tax increases require approval of voters. I'm not sure how much longer SF residents can be duped into underwriting the obscene compensation of much of the City's gigantic payroll. We'll see.

Someone should tell Ed Lee voters passed the state sales tax as a TEMPORARY surcharge and James Lazarus is a Chamber rep- what a disgrace.

For a non-politician, Ed Lee is a heckuva politician. Sales tax increases, tax increases for potholes, trim your own trees and pension reform-lite all in the midst of a major recession - and all proposed with a big smile on his face...

I'm posting this, with permission, for a reader who emailed me directly:

Read your piece on the SF budget, tax proposals etc. Ed Lee has proposed selling debt to fund what should be budgeted maintenance. Unfortunately, it might pass. It is ironic that a city of struggling young families would support higher sales taxes, as those are the most regressive of all. Mr Lee's pedigree as an aparatchik of DPW does not qualify him as a careful budget administrator. As an old friend once said, you can judge the level of corruption in any town by the condition of it's streets.
As for registration "fees", those are less obnoxious than the sales tax, but will hit people like myself: self employed, electrical contractor, needs truck, (just can't get those ladders and tools on my bicycle), and coerced by Federal tax law into having a second vehicle. No wonder so many people use addresses outside the city on their vehicle registration-sure to increase.
As for me, I see a chain of drop-in circumcision parlors just over the line in San Mateo County, "Top of The Hill...
Tom Tillinghast
SF, CA

The City Family never stops, they are amazing at how consistent they can be, always pushing for more revenues, more taxes, more fees, and never spending cuts. Well, they do cut some things, like street repair, and services for the disabled, seniors, things like that, but the City Family never cuts their own revenue stream of high salaries, premium benefits and a golden retirement plan.

The voters need to say no, this has gone on long enough...

A small, case in point about excessive number of City Workers.
artment is asked to cut their budget by x %.

With knee jerk reaction the Chief announces that she will have to either "brown out" firehouses or shut a firehouse down. There is no other choice....... she wants you to believe.

Naturally, citizens do not want their firehouses closed. The Chief knows this and the mayor and Board know this and they curry favor when they keep firehouses open.

Are there other options to reduce the budget that citizens might accept if she suggested them?

YES!

Closing one firehouse for a year would save approximately $3 million dollars.

Each day there are 6 Chiefs' Drivers positions at about $130,000 per that cost approximately $3 million dollars a year.

In case of fire or earthquake, would you rather have a manned, water pumping, emergency vehicle at the ready or 6 clean cut, uniformed, flashlight and clipboard carrying drivers?

In addition, each day in Fire Suppression, 11 Battalion Chiefs who earn over $200,000 a year are on duty. Harvey Rose a decade ago said this was an excessive number and should be reduced to 7 Chiefs each day.

If the number of Chiefs were to be reduced by 4 each day, the savings would be $3.5 million dollars each year.

Would citizens agree to this kind of cutback? Yes, they would rather have a fire engine and crew that can pump water onto a flame and administer medical care to a neighborhood rather than a Chief across town sitting in a firehouse watching television.

Examples like these are, I would guess, in each and every Department in the City.

Tom,

Willie Brown used to say, (probably still does) "Don't bring me talk about maintenance. We don't make any money off maintenance. We make money off contracts.".

You understand that?

The City loses hundreds of millions with crap contracts given to vendors who bribe public officials with campaign contributions and other perks. The City withdraws maintenance from a facility like, oh say, Harding Golf Course ... allows it to deteriorate and then says that City workers can't do the job and so they first contract for outside services and labor ... then, they just give the friggin' land and buildings and docks and trees and grass to the wealthy for decades and the real SF public loses access.

Ed Lee was, I believe, City Purchaser or something when the City had an agency called, 'Computer Store' or something like that. Vague enough? Anyway, (and, this will come out in detail if he tosses his cap into the ring - doesn't he look S.I. Hiyakawa?) a gangster wanted to run contracts through the agency and the agency staff said the vendor didn't look legitimate and Willie Brown told Ed Lee to let em in anyway and they did and they guy ran away with the money and bottom line is that Ed Lee always does what Willie Brown wants and if Lee's elected mayor it will be same as having Willie back.

Giants tonight against 1st place Cleveland 7pm tonite.

h.

Sadly, the response of the Bay Guardian crowd and the "progressive" Supervisors to the City's economic and budget crisis is all too typical.

As always, they will fall back on their belief that San Francisco is an island and raise taxes and fees, especially on people they consider to be "rich" (translation: anybody with a professional job or who works at a place that doesn't allow you to bring your dog to the office) and on any business that doesn't fit into their concept of a "good" company (sorry Whole Foods, you lost your SF cred when your CEO attacked Obama's health plan).

While there probably isn't any way to get Homeless Industry™ executives and starry-eyed Bay Guardian types to broaden their myopic views, making SF Supervisor a part-time job and requiring both the Mayor and the entire Board of Supervisors to make annual visits to Washington DC and Baltimore would go a long way in making our leaders realize what happens when taxpayers and businesses are permanently driven away.

Which Homeless Industry™ executives is Mission Rosalind referring to, & how does a segment of the non-profit sector become an industry or get that nifty trademark sign?

It's unfortunate that Ed Lee is a career bureaucrat with no real world (private sector) experience. In his world residents exist solely for the convince of city employees and city funded non-profits. Its also unfortunate that the Chamber of Commerce is buying into the "we need more money from the productive taxpaying citizens to subsidize the bloated city payroll of about 26,000 bureaucrats and the unproductive people on the dole." Only in San Francisco.

Your readership is done a disservice when a column such as this characterises its opposition as comprised of loons who don't have a legitimate perspective: Those squandering wastrels just love taxes, fear unions, & are out of touch with the rest of the country!

The fact is that we have services in San Francisco from which we all benefit & which beat what's available in most other cities. Such services are accompanied by increased costs. It is true that we also have waste, & we also have services from which only part of the population—sometimes a minority—receives primary benefit. But we have to recognise that a chunk of our taxes pay for real services that, as best we can tell, a majority of the city wants to exist: Voters determined that they wanted minimum staffing levels for SFPD. They determined that they wanted Treatment on Demand. This isn't graft. This is a voter determination that a public good is worth the extra expense. If we do not see new revenues, then we will have to either cut more services, or cut pay or benefits for City workers.

Last fall, voters rejected cuts to City employee pensions & healthcare just this past fall. How is that the result of the potent political force of City employee unions? Did unions bully voters somehow? What would that even look like? (Sure, unions threw a lot of money at defeating Prop B, but did Prop B's finance sector backers not do the same?) Again, the ballot should be seen as a value statement from the electorate.

It's fair to claim that the particular goods that we purchase in San Francisco aren't economically or socially worth the taxes, & that the electorate has made the wrong choice, & has selected politicians who've continued to make that same wrong choice. I certainly disagree with the majority of the electorate of my city, state, & nation on many issues: It's not wrong to be in a minority. But it's disingenuous to deny that there are real service, cost, & labour value issues that reflect value judgments that the voters of San Francisco have made. That fact merits acknowledgment, even in an opinion column. This isn't, after all, the Chronicle.

Yes. we are paying a premium, an excessive one, when a cop/firefighter in SF gets about double the pay and pension benefits that a cop/firefighter gets in NYC, then something is definitely wrong...

The author of this piece throws out an apples vs. oranges comparison to make a point that San Francisco has too many employees and then supposedly qualifies it presumably to avoid criticisms like mine, but that is just bs. : "San Francisco has about 26,000 public employees. San Jose, a much larger city, has just 5,300 (though San Francisco is also a county and provides services a city does not)" It's a sore point with me when articles throw around numbers with no thought behind them. In this case, it would be worthwhile to compare the sum total employment of all governments in Santa Clara county vs. San Francisco county, as well as the services provided (a hard task and I've never seen it done). Mission Rosalind is sort of the right track here, but she needs to include all 88 cities in Los Angeles County (yes, 88!), plus other boards and commissions at the various levels of municipal and county governments in Los Angeles County before she compares the number of employees per 1000 with San Francisco County.

And then you need to look at services provided. To our great moral credit in SF, we as a city both by our elected representatives and uncounted publicly voted initiatives have decided to take care of the most vulnerable among us, with SF General Hospital, Laguna Honda, and a huge array of other services to the disadvantaged, as well as tons of other services to the middle class like parks and recreation. Los Angeles and Santa Clara counties provide some of these services, but not all. It's a hard but not impossible problem to compare staffing for levels of service, but I rarely see it done. I'd love to see, for example, the number of employees per thousand riders for MUNI versus other transit districts in CA or the USA. Or the number patrolling policeman per thousand versus the number of supervisory per comparable jurisdiction. These kinds of numbers would speak to whether our departments and agencies were overstaffed or understaffed, but we never see those sort of figures.

Nobody will deny that there is inefficiency, waste, even downright laziness in city government. Everyone who ever has to deal with the city on any level can see it instantly, but I would also say that is true of dealing with any large organization, for profit or not. It is a worthy goal to reduce and eliminate the waste, and the progressive forces in San Francisco are remiss in not making that a much bigger part of their program, as efficient service is better for everyone. It is just plain unfortunate that the right wing wing has co-opted the the words "waste and ineffiency" and turned it into a crusade to eliminate services to the poor and middle class. It's time for the left to take that part of the budget equation back to their side of the fight, and fight for both an efficient and well paid city workforce that puts in a good hard day's work serving the public.

If you want to discuss the problem in a serious way, do some serious journalism and dig at the facts and figures. What was presented here was just another silly "San Francisco is a crazy town" piece, with no real content. I'm disappointed at the Bay Citizen in this regard because this was supposed to be a place where there is some real journalism instead of what passes for it nowadays.

'BF'

"Serious commenting"? You, sir or madame, are just another internet coward hiding behind anonymous initials. Man up! Woman up! Give your name or get lost. Like virtually everyone on the internet I'm sick and tired of people like you doing character assassination from the ambush of anonymity.

Giants on in an hour.

h.

In San Francisco, rookie cops start out at $82K in base salary, in NYC they start out at $46K and Philadelphia they start at $43K, might this be part of the problem???

Other big cities pay up to 55% in retirement, while in SF they can earn up to 90%, might this be part of the problem???

I'm sure we can do the same comparison for the fire department, and probably every other city department as well...

The bottom line is that SF spends way too much money on its employees!

While the debate over staffing levels and salaries is a valid one, the real pressing issue is how will SF prioritize and fund the services it provides to its citizens. The "progressive" approach is only viable during boom times and is spectacularly unsuited for recessionary and recovery periods.

For those who want to move beyond the emotional and ideological arguments used by the Bay Guardian-crowd and the City Family to justify their agendas, I recommend taking a look at:

Triumph of the City (Glaeser)
--"Restrictive places, such as New York City, coastal California, and Paris, have a tight housing supply with prices only the wealthy can afford. Hence, middle-class people move to the suburbs or cities like Houston. Other features of metropolises-their incidences of poverty and crime, traffic congestion, quality of schools, and cultural amenities-also figure in Glaeser's analysis. Whatever the city under discussion, Mumbai or Woodlands, Texas, Glaeser is discerning and independent; for example, he believes that historic preservation isn't an unalloyed good and that bigger, denser cities militate against global warming."

The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid (Prahalad)
--Programs to promote social justice and economic equity do not have to be the sole province of the public sector.

Imagining India (Nilekani)
--SF is rapidly becoming like 1970's India, in terms of government, politics, and economics. The obstacles that India now faces in emerging from developing market status are uncannily similar to the outcomes of "progressive" governance. Nilekani, unknowingly, has provided both a warning and a way out for the City as well as for India.