Council doing little
To the editor:
This is an open letter to Mayor Sullivan and all Cape Coral council members:
Your group, consisting, now, of three previously elected holdovers and four recently elected members, is proving to be a timid, ineffective, do-nothing, debating, society. It is certainly not the dynamic, proactive, problem-solving reform group that your campaign rhetoric in the last election led us to expect. Shame on all of you, particularly the new four. You have not put forth a comprehensive plan or taken any significant actions to address the city’s most important problem, which is making the major and timely cutbacks in expenditures that the present financial crunch demands. None of you have demonstrated the will and guts necessary to cut back expenditures enough to meet income. This is particularly true when considering personnel reductions. There you have made a few minor cuts but have been waffling and ducking the tough decisions on major cuts. In effect, you are acting like a Benevolent an Protective Society for city employees. The city’s unions must love you.
The city is facing several large and important financial problems, notably repayment of $4.1 million of utilities overcharges and spending the millions it will cost to restart the utilities project in Southwest 6/7. Consequently, the council should not even be considering spending $27 million on the proposed swimming pool complex in the northern part of the city, that is a massive pie-in-the-sky boondoggle that we cannot afford now and that the taxpayers are likely to get stuck with in a few years. However, the “800 pound gorilla” in this whole bleak scenario is the urgent problem of cutting back the city’s bloated bureaucracy. You can continue to dissemble and delay action on some of these problems, but please tackle the last one seriously and promptly. That is where the real savings will be made. To help you get started on this last problem, I recommend that you immediately announce and strictly enforce two actions. The first is a 10 percent across-the-board reduction in personnel costs (using layoffs, reduction of overtime, employees sharing of health insurance costs, etc.); it should include a top-to-bottom two-year freeze of all salaries and wages. The second is a 10 percent across-the-board cut in all departmental budgets. These actions will slightly reduce the level of service that the city provides residents and taxpayers, but we can live with that easier than a tax increase later this year. They will also cause considerable weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth by the affected city employees, but you are supposed to be tough reformers, not pantywaists or sissies, who can withstand that heat.
Above all, please remember that you work for the taxpayers, not the employees, and are expected to show some real leadership and policy making ability in these difficult times.
James L. Lane
Cape Coral