Wednesday, May 31, 2006 | Neil Morgan is right to exhort all of us to be more involved in our city’s government, but he misses one important point: special interests (public employee unions and developers) have this city hog-tied, bound and gagged. More than most cities, people who want to make a difference in the way things are done here have to fight ferociously and for a long time to get anything changed. Because this is such a transient town, the assumption among the native San Diego gravy-trainers in city government is that eventually you’ll just go away and they can go back to giving themselves raises.
After everything we’ve been through, nothing has changed. Those of us who own businesses and have real jobs are genuinely too busy to constantly fight the good fight against such dug in truculence. The bureaucracy protects itself with redundant onion layers, constantly justifying its own existence while demanding higher taxes so that officials can live outside city limits making much more money than they could out here in reality.