I received a letter in the mail on Saturday from the public officials who run my city of Covina, CA. The letter states because voters (apparently, ill-informed and/or lied to voters) struck down the Utility Users tax in our city, they will have to shut down or limit services in a severe way.
I'll be honest. I pay very close attention to elections, but I'd never even heard of this one back in March that was about this issue. I'm willing to bet many others in our small city didn't know either. We're comprised of roughly 50,000 people, with a median income of around $50,000, but 12 percent of residents live below the poverty line, and 40% of the households have children in them. What this means is while there is a fair amount of people doing quite well, there is a healthy percentage of people who depend on city services. (See Wikipedia entry here.)
Details below the jump....
The services proposed to be cut are this:
The closing of our historical, 110-year-old library, which provides the best Internet access of any library within a large radius, along with books and historical materials that are first-rate.
The termination of six police officers.
The closing of one out of the three fire stations.
Reductions in the Finance, Public Information, Health, and Code Enforcement departments.
The terminations of all community outreach services, including the closure of the city swimming pool, athletic programs, and the parks and recreation programs.
Cutting off all city lighting at midnight, severe reductions in basic maitenance for roads, trees, traffic lights, and other public grounds.
Cuts in salary to all city staffers (ongoing, has already resulted in the loss of employees to neighboring cities).
To call this bad is an understatement. It is the gutting of a fine city, a small city who has stayed pretty well clean and safe. It's not perfect, for instance, I live in an apartment complex where the management is so bad sometimes that those health and code departments had to come in to get them to clean up. Library usage is doubled in the past decade because people like me aren't making enough and can't afford to buy books or replace a broken computer. I get books every couple of weeks from there so we can read to our kids, and they're doing better than most kids in their grade level because we spend that time with them. We take them to the parks so they can play somewhere else than a somewhat crowded apartment (we used to have a house, but you can guess what happened there) and get fresh air. We, and many others, use these services, and all that will be left is the lowest level of basic services a city can provide, and even those won't be full services because they will be cut.
We need help. Any Kossacks living here or nearby, I urge you to contact U.S. Rep Hilda Solis here and State Rep. Dr. Ed Hernandez here. If it can happen here, in a clean family town that has a fair portion of people with good income, it can happen anywhere. Imagine YOUR city without public services. Imagine losing YOUR library (and this one goes back to the Carnegie grants). Please, take a minute to help, and if you have ideas how to help save things, put them in comments. There's a special town hall meeting Saturday morning, and I want to go in with facts, ideas, and guns blazing.