No Savings, Just Heaps of Misery and Flies

June 6, 2018

Dear Editor,

Gleam Davis’ suggestion that trash pickup should happen every two weeks to help pay for the cities bloated salaries is appalling ("Budget Cuts Loom as Costs Rise at Santa Monica City Hall," May 29, 2018).

Ours is a large family that usually fills more than half our trash and recycling bins. So either we will overflow, (and start putting our trash in someone else’s bin) or we will need to double our number of bins; but we have nowhere to put them, and after two weeks in summer they will be stinking to high heaven.

And legally, the city should only charge sufficient fees to pay for the services provided, so any money saved by twice-monthly pickup must be returned to resident. . . so no savings, just heaps of misery and flies.

As for saving money, the city has been spending money like water on wages and grandiose white-elephant schemes:

Tonga park cost $42 million, and should have cost at most $20 million. Now we have an underused, desolate jumble of concrete nooks for the homeless to smoke pot in and harass parents running the gauntlet to get to the little used kiddy park.

The new city hall offices will cost $77 million, and should have cost $30 million. Putting more solar panels throughout the city would have cost a fraction of that and saved more energy. And surely a bigger building will require more staff to fill it, when we should be reducing an already bloated head count.

Fighting "district-wide" elections has cost $4 million, and will probably end up at $8 million, and is guaranteed to lose. Faced with such a lawsuit recently the city of Torrance instantly caved.

Listed above are $70+ million blatantly wasted dollars, with less than nothing in return. And the residents are rewarded with twice monthly trash pickup?!

Give me a red pen and the city’s budget and I could fix the budget crisis in a day -- without filling our alleys with stinking piles of trash.

Yours sincerely,

Peter Borresen
Santa Monica