And now we get to the point where I start making waves about the labor affairs of the City of Plainfield.
I did a thorough review of the City Budget for fiscal years 2010 and 2011, and compared them against the one from 2005. To make a long story short, there were very few places where I looked at a particular department or program, and thought to myself that its cost was unacceptable. In fact, although I will deny eventually that I ever said this, I found that Mayor Robinson-Briggs and her Administration have done a very, very good job of squeezing out the fat. We had to make substantial reductions from 2010 to 2011, mainly because the amount of State aid has dropped sharply, and also due to the poor economic picture, which affects the real estate and construction businesses so sadly. One could quibble about fine details, but there really wasn’t any bloat in any of the departments. And now, a reasonable belt-tightening has been applied to all of them.
Still, I think property owners are paying far too much in local taxes. I pay close to $15,000 for owning a house here, and depending on how my law practice and my partner’s accounting practice are doing, sometimes it really hurts!! I live with the feeling I don’t get my money’s worth, and I believe, so do most of the citizens.
Our municipal budget this year is about $70,000.000, down about $4,000,000 from last year as a result of the aforementioned belt-tightening. The amount raised by our property tax is about $50,000,000. We do have about $5,000,000 a year that comes in from a variety of local sources, like fees for various permits, fines from Municipal Court, and $1,500,000 from the PMUA (another whole article lurks in that acronym). I was hoping to find a way to promise that if elected, I will REDUCE everyone’s property taxes.
So Plainfield costs $70,000,000 a year to run, without frills, but can only raise about $55,000,000 a year, even with unreasonably high taxes. If we were a private business, we would do a complete restructuring and maybe sell off a division or two, quite likely with help from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court. We can’t really do that. There are four big-ticket items in our Budget: $15,000,000 for the Police, $9,000,000 for the Fire Department, $4,000,000 for the State pension systems, and $11,300,000 for insurance, of which almost $9,000,000 is for “group insurance plans”.
We can’t do anything about the State pension funds, which if anything, have been badly under-contributed-to for too long.
We can, and must, lower the costs of insurance. Because of the union contracts we have had in effect for decades, we have been giving away free medical coverage, not only to employees, but for an unlimited number of family members. Unfortunately the cost of health coverage for everyone has skyrocketed. We need to make employees pay in the cost of coverage for their dependents, or at least a large part of it. Indeed, they should have to pay in at least part of their own coverage. And we need to police aggressively the list of “dependents” which employees claim to have, to see how many don’t belong there anyway. You knew I’d get back to the labor unions eventually, right?
And what about the enormous burden of our police and firemen? I do not really think we can reduce these costs a whole lot, without compromising our safety. Except for one thing: why does Plainfield spend so much more per capita for these services than most other municipalities do? I propose commissioning a study, with nothing off the table, to find out what is causing the need for such large uniformed forces. Oh, I think I know some of the reasons, and most of you do too, but it will be much easier politically to tackle the causes of our costs AFTER generating a bunch of statistics. There are plenty of obvious targets, but I want to be fair about this process.
It is said that when you rob Peter all the time, to pay Paul, you will always have lots of support from Paul. And with that metaphor, I lay down the political gauntlet for this year. Some of the causes of our perennial financial imbalance will take a long time to tackle. But the labor unions are in Peter’s pocket all the time. I will vote against any labor contract, and for that matter any professional contract, that costs more than we can reasonably afford.
To return to my previous observations about labor unions, the public is not to be treated like a big, rich manufacturing corporation. They may be able to give their workers a bigger slice of the pie without really endangering themselves. We cannot, and to even ask us to is simply indecent. If unionized workers don’t like it, they don’t have to work for us.
Michelson's View 