6% Too Harsh

Monday, April 27, 2009 | After the dust settled on the 8-0 vote imposing the mayor’s contracts on the unions, looking ahead to future votes there is room for compromise. The 6% being taken away from each city worker is definitely hurting the lower income workers more than the higher salary types. For example, the janitor compared to the relative city manager. This truth should be obvious to all. So I might suggest as a compromise, a graduated scale of three, four and five percent brackets creating a tiered system if you will. Preventing our lowest paid city workers from being hit the hardest. We can couple that with making sure that other non-union city employees, agencies and executives take cuts as well. This would create a 4% over all approach to cutting our budgets.

I think that this would achieve a more equitable outcome for city workers and non-city workers, who after all, are taxpayers.