DID YOU KNOW? Bonnie Donovan
Did You Know? was forwarded a letter from Dr. Thomas Cole, of Analytics 805. It indicates that the Santa Barbara County Grand Jury has issued a report showing that the previous city administration has been sitting on unfunded pension liabilities of $386,111,684, while overspending in a number of areas.
Dr. Cole’s letter summarized: “Reading through the recent Grand Jury report on Santa Barbara City pensions. It shows the city has unfunded pensions of $386,111,684.
“Considering the city’s current total 2022 budget is $391,968,325, which includes salaries $116,321,484 and benefits of $62,527,103 paid every year,” Dr. Cole wrote. “It seems Santa Barbara needs to go on a spending diet. Jenny Craig times $386 million…
“We might ask how much is $386M. To illustrate, we did a survey of commercial buildings on State Street from Gutierrez Street to Canon Perdido. That turns out to be 718,000 (square feet) of buildings, restaurants … The average price to buy or sell these properties is $550/sf. Thus; 718,000 sf x $550/sf is $394 million. The same amount as the city’s unfunded pension liability…
“The city would literally have to sell the first four blocks of State Street from Gutierrez to Canon Perdido to pay the unfunded part of retired city employee pensions,” Dr. Cole wrote.
“While the city of Santa Barbara’s unfunded pension liability is $386,111,684, the county of SB’s unfunded liability is $1,103,795,000. The total unfunded liability for eight cities plus the county is $1,778,825,376. So the county’s unfunded pension liability is greater than that of all the SB cities combined.
“New City Sustainability & Resilience Program unfunded $36M per year — 28 affordable housing units $30M — Global warming lines across town, Hotels for homeless… Ask yourself: How many more blocks of State Street shall we give away to our spendthrift city government?”
DYK believes: It is time for the new mayor and council to control spending and to save money toward paying down the debt liability before it becomes an issue of urgent action. The Grand Jury noted the city of Santa Barbara was one of three they deemed to be at higher long-term risk than the others.
We were under the impression that Sacramento had decreed that these huge underfunding of government retirement obligations had to be corrected. Is that not so?
Two other immediate cost savings come to mind.
Cancel the $200,000 survey to determine how much more stringently members of the city council can control residential rents, beyond the controls already imposed by the state government. Reject the overbearing police oversight commission proposals that will cost the city and the police department well over one million dollars a year in a completely unnecessary enlargement of the city bureaucracy of $670,200 per year and perhaps another million a year in interference with police department management operations and procedures.
These Grand Jury conclusions are a great tool for Mayor Randy Rowse and other council members to start the process of reigning in spending. The taxpayers need action quickly, in advance of any more financial commitments that are beyond the functional spending to run the city.
Here is another cost-effective solution to the issue of police oversight that will not require the creation of another bureaucracy overhead and will avoid spending another approximately $600,000 a year in new salaries plus additional city costs in retirement benefits and medical coverages.
As chief executive of the city, the mayor can create an executive board, the Police Oversight Board that meets monthly. The board would be chaired by the mayor, and the two executive officers also on the board would be the city administrator and the chief of police. Non-city inspectors of the process would be one or two members or past members of the Santa Barbara County Grand Jury and a member of the Santa Barbara Attorney’s Office. When necessary, members of the public will be invited to participate or testify on specific subjects to aid the Oversight Committee in understanding specific questions or issues.
The starting point could be a review of all the eight complaints about police actions that occurred in 2021. This would include all details of the actions involved that led to each complaint and all steps taken by the police leadership to resolve the complaints and all actions taken in regard to the individual police personnel involved. It would be a starting point to set objectives for the future. It would include a definition of lessons learned and the steps taken to address any systemic or general application of lessons learned to the police employees in general, including training of police officers.
This process would be repeated and revised as necessary, to address new issues and define new training needs or procedures within the police department through monthly meetings among the entire team and work assignments decided by the commission members.
Did You Know waste is not only in the city — the waste is also in our schools? The rot has set in from bottom to top in our state-run education.
It runs from political indoctrination “in divisive, racial stereotypes and in gender deviations from the norm from the earliest grades to grade 12. Meanwhile, throughout all grades, at least 40% of students fail to meet grade-level standards in English and Math. The result is many undereducated students graduating from high schools, who borrow money to enter colleges in which they are ill-prepared to earn a useful degree.” Student debt is now $1.73 trillion and rising fast. The enormity of student loan debt can be understood more clearly by comparing it to existing credit card debt which varies between $807 billion and $910 billion over 506 million credit card accounts.
Accompanying all this is the opulence of salaries and benefits paid to exalted university presidents and the unlimited perks given to tenured professors who have forgotten how to teach.
We’ll end today with the sick pay raise given to Chancellor Henry T. Yang at UCSB.
Did you know 16 members of the University of California Board of Regents approved pay raises for all nine UC chancellors? Chancellor Yang, who currently makes $451,362 per year, received a 28.4% raise and will now make $579,750 per year beginning this month for the 2022-23 academic year. Is the UC system retirement-funded?
This is all on top of his free, very large house overlooking the lagoon on the UCSB campus.
Oh, we will have more on schools next week.
