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Dumanis Gives the Green Light to Corruption
Response to 22 and 23 plus many other comments. City employees were offered a pension program they accepted. The City stole their money, and failed to invest it to cover the pension benefits. The City now blames the employees for the problem. If the pension program could not be funded, it should not have been set up by the city. It's still not the fault of the employees. Corruption in the City at every level has caused this and continued this. As for the dollar amounts involved, you are a bit off. City employees have to work for a long time to earn the pension, just like anyone else. Is the pension better than in the private sector? Usually. Can they begin to collect earlier than in the private sector? Usually. Are there reasons they get to collect earlier? Yes - many. Police Officers, Firemen, and many other City Workers do hard physical labor. Their ability to do that job does not last as long as most positions in the private sector, and is the same reason that 20 years is a career in the military. Just one more note - almost all Police Officers have at least a bachelors degree, with a very large number of masters degrees and Phd's. Even more surprising is the number of them whose degrees are in engineering and other areas, with additional study in law and criminal justice. The number who simply have a GED is small, but a person with a GED who can meet the mental, physical, and psychological requirements to be a police officer should be a proud group, because they managed to beat the odds stacked against them and advance to a position they can be proud of.— May 7, 2010 8:59 p.m.
Dumanis Gives the Green Light to Corruption
So we see the District Attorney let the person on the pension board go, after he was part of the scheme by the City Council to steal the pension money from the employees. The real question in this mess is why does the City continue to hold the employees guilty for the actions of the City Council and the pension board. The facts go like this - The Mayor and the City Council set up a pension board - Then they go to their board and tell them that they want to under fund the pensions they have agreed to pay their employees so they can blow the money on some other City schemes. The citizens of the City find out the City Council and th Mayor stole the money, so the Mayor and the City Council blame the pension board and the employees for making it possible for the City to steal their money. Here's how that would go in normal daily life - A purse snatcher runs down the street and steals an elderly woman's purse. He gets caught and the police arrest the elderly woman for making it easy to steal her purse, then try to take her money away from her.— May 6, 2010 7:53 a.m.
Mayor Jerry Sanders
Cuddlefish - The Police, Fire, and Rescue people will always do their jobs, if they are there. The problem is the loss of those people as they are either forced to retire or forced to do the jobs of people who are laid off. When you take roughly 500 police officers, or between 20% and 25% of the force off the street, it could take a long time for them to get there. People, like you, apparently, who don't care about the corruption in the Mayor's office and in the City Council, are the ones who allow the city to close the community service center, cut the hours of the library and parks and recreation department, and destroy law enforcement and fire so they can pay off their contributors. I guess you'd only be concerned if Donna Frye flashed the rest of the City Council.— February 9, 2010 10:05 p.m.