<p>I got a ticket for holding a cell phone at a stop sign. My youngest daughter was talking to her sister while I was stopped. My youngest handed me the phone. I brought it up to my ear to say good- bye. As I did that my eyes caught a cop’s eyes. </p>
<p>Ticket.</p>
<p>Did I mention I wasn’t moving and the only two cars on the road were the cop’s and mine?</p>
<p>There are so many things the state government does…</p>
<p>For somebody like Bay to even ask that question?</p>
<p>We have k to 12 education. Great university system. Medicaid. Prisons. DMV. Court system. State Parks. Road building and maintenance. A legislature…Yes we need a legislature. Support for the poor. Support for developers.</p>
<p>I was just reading about people Objecting to the Golden Gate Bridge being built.
Sometimes …besides costs…there are benefits.</p>
<p>dstark, it’s worse than that…people have received tickets for using a cell/texting when their car is fully stopped, at a curb, in a legal parking spot, in parking gear…but the ignition was on.</p>
<p>Here police generally don’t stop drivers of cars with certain states’ plates no matter what the drivers are doing. It’s part of being a sanctuary city. I guess the brass knows that there is no revenue in stopping those drivers and the police know that stopping them will only take time away from meeting quotas.</p>
<p>The vast majority of Penn license plates are on cars driven by illegal immigrants?</p>
<p>I don’t know how they treat illegal immigrants where you live…</p>
<p>But in the neighborhood near Mission St and 22 st…in SF…there was a huge sweep…and that area went from one of the most populated areas in the US to a sparsely populated area overnight.</p>
<p>SF…the liberal, commie city…just went whooosh.</p>
<p>I have been told that illegal immigration is becoming emmigration.</p>
<p>Why aren’t the illegal immigrants with Penn plates arrested and deported?</p>
<p>LasMa…every time I drive over a bridge - it’s a minimum $6.00 toll. So, that’s something I left off the list of things I’m paying for. State Parks…aka ‘independent 420 growing facilities’, also a great place for our intentionally homeless to hangout, camp, hold drug parties so …actually, those parks are really not available to many. Just try to get into Yosemite…better pay a fee and buy a permit. Oh, an on the subject of potholes…our one lane road ARE collapsing and the funds voted for improvements get sucked into general funds instead.</p>
<p>The traffic ticket situation in CA is beyond abusive. Parking authority in SF is now ticketing drivers for not curbing wheels…on flat streets…saying that there is a 3% grade! No more free ‘fix it’ tickets…broken tail light…fix it and then pay $50.00. Going 10 miles over the limit $458! </p>
<p>The waste in our school systems is criminal. No, not on teacher pay…but on administration. And then, each school needs to provide each service for each type of student. We could save $$$ by having some services concentrated in certain schools…Now it is like asking every airport in the US to be able to handle an Airbus 800…just so things are fair - duplication duplication duplication. And let’s not start on the Dream Act.</p>
<p>My even though we have prop 13 to limit property taxes my annual bill has a large extra $$ amount in the form of ‘assessments’. </p>
<p>And…then we have a very very large portion of our population which pays no income tax what so ever. But…yes…let’s demonize the ‘rich’ because they deserve it.</p>
<p>My county has a 10% sales tax. The tourist stores put up signs explaining to customers why their $10.00 item costs them $11.00. SF put in a mandatory charge for every restaurant bill - healthy SF - except if you are a part time employee - you still don’t get the benefit. </p>
<p>Giving our current system more $$$ is like giving a drunk ‘just one last drink’.</p>
<p>Our local police and fire are employed by our city, not the State of CA. I don’t know if our city gets money from the State to help fund our PD, but I have not heard of that.</p>
<p>Our freeways are patrolled by CA Highway Patrol, so they may be impacted by State budget cuts. Other than enforcing speed limits, I don’t think there is a lot of crime occurring on our freeways.</p>
<p>dstark,
I am well aware that the State funds a lot of programs, but LasMa was asking us which of those programs that personally impact us in a big way would we be willing to give up. I cannot think of a lot of State programs that impact me personally. State parks can charge fees, and I will pay to use them - I am okay with that. Our public schools may be impacted, but is there much evidence that $ and education quality are necessarily related? I thought that experiment in Chicago proved that throwing money at schools doesn’t produce better students.</p>
<p>I don’t think we should be providing financial aid for illegal immigrants. It is a waste of money.</p>
<p>People travel from all over the world to see the Golden Gate Bridge.
Yosemite is beautiful.</p>
<p>I don’t know where you live…but since you travel on the Golden Gate Bridge…you can try Samuel Taylor Park. The whole coastal area is amazing. Government lands.</p>
<p>SF is a fantastic city. Not a cheap place to live or run.</p>
<p>dstark: as to my post being ridicules … it is a direct response to LasMa asking about those services itemized which are benefits and which I in LasMa’s opinion I would be giving up for more cuts. My point…I’m already paying for them…so you are correct, it is ridicules.</p>
<p>Much of the open land to which you refer (such as the GGNRA) are federally funded and as such a State cutback doesn’t matter. </p>
<p>So, there really aren’t any services which I can think of where a cutback would be painful. Which brings us to the fact that those PAYING for the services NOW are becoming fewer and fewer in number while those BENEFITING from those services now are increasing in number. Both givers and receivers vote. As someone who’s had/has both drunks and the ‘constantly broke before payday’ members in the family…I can assure you the answer is not another drink or another loan. But the drunk will vote for the drink and the over spender for yet another ‘loan’. But, that system assumes a steady supply of givers.</p>
<p>In our case…we moved our business out of the state and frankly…may do so with our person in later years.</p>
I told you why. A. It is a sanctuary city. B. There is no revenue to be made in arresting them. C. In light of A and B,ticketing them doesn’t help police officers reach their ticket quotas.</p>
<p>I pulled the acturial report on the State pension I am in. You can access it on line if you want. Until 2001 the State contribution rate was 3.9% of payroll. The pension was 108% of needed funding. Now with all the missed payments the contribution rate should be 18.95%.
I do not consider 3.9% excessive.
Local employers were to contribute 3.49%. Now it is 10.47%</p>
<p>Take a broader view. For example, the increase in the cost of a parking ticket. As the state budget shrinks, more is clawed back from your local government. The city and/or county government needs to make ends meet. Bumping up the cost of traffic and parking tickets is one local revenue source that slips under the radar (no pun intended ). </p>
<p>Or consider the state releasing prisoners from state penitentiaries because of overcrowding. If they’re still going to be incarcerated, then they must be housed at a local level. Appropriate/adequate facilities don’t exist; that’s not what jails were constructed to do. So either you will be paying at a local level for expanding jails, or you’ll be seeing more inmates released at a time when the economy is barely beginning to pick back up.</p>
<p>Any kind of state regulatory inspection could be severely curtailed. Monitoring of bacterial contamination levels at beaches. Air quality, and inspection of gross polluters. Tracking poultry disease, or those utterly frightening little wasps that could wipe out the state’s citrus industry in a decade. You’re a business owner, and may reply that there’s too much regulation and that it’s strangling business. I’d argue that it’s there in the background, and most won’t notice it until it’s not there when you need it.</p>
<p>Slithy: You make some very good points. But I still struggle with how much of my state is managed. For example, it is my understanding in regards to traffic tickets that there is a base fee and then a mandatory 100% surcharge imposed by the state on top of that base. So, yes, local governments receive a benefit, but the reason the costs are so high is that the State gets the same amount. D just figured out that her speeding ticket plus the cost of traffic school amounts to 60 hrs of minimum wage work. </p>
<p>As for the inspections. I can go along with that to some degree…but …again there is sooooo much waste. Take for example a property we purchased several years ago, it had a pool. A requirement of escrow was that all ‘systems’ were up to standard. Well, there were several years of 'passed; pool inspections on file so …no problem. Or so one would think. Then, about 2 years into our ownership, where each year we paid $400.00 (to the county not the State) we received a big red notice listing violations and fines associated with the pool. I called the inspectors division and…get this…well, we charge you every year but we don’t um , like, really come out and take a look every year…sometimes we only get out there every 5 years or so…unless there is an incident. When pushed…the inspector reduced the list of ‘pool problems’ and slunk away. Cal OSHA manuals make our the tax code books look like cliff notes. I could go on and on.</p>
<p>Regulation is needed and makes much of our lives better…however, the system as it stands is bloated, loves duplication of effort and fees and is beyond frustrating for many end users. As for the prisoners…I think there is a fantastic pothole fixing labor pool just waiting to be tapped.</p>
<p>dietz, I can understand your frustration with the pool inspection and so much else. I don’t know what’s the best way to scrub at this. Do we need yearly inspections for pools? Different answers for if it’s at a private home, at an apartment building, or at a business. If the yearly inspections are justified, why isn’t the inspector coming out? Etc, etc. etc. </p>
<p>As for prisoners and pothole duty, I think that’d be a great win-win situation…but where’s the money for that going to come from? Seriously, I fear that far more local infrastructure is going to end up being privatized. We’ve (spouse and I) already taken over responsibility from our city for our street trees, because calling out the city to get a badly overgrown tree trimmed seemed to result in trees just getting chopped down, with no replacements. There’s talk of making homeowners responsible for maintaining the sidewalk in front of their homes. Homeowners filling in potholes is probably a pipe dream in some city planner or budgeter’s mind. </p>
<p>The federal government has a contest where they ask people to submit ideas for how government can be made more efficient, or where money can be saved. Maybe what we need is a state ombudsperson who can have a suggestion box where people could point out the low-hanging fruit. Yeah, I know, that would take money too. We had CA residents who volunteered to help with redistricting; maybe we could have a similar volunteer system to help separate out ideas really worth addressing.</p>
<p>I think the implication is that the prisoner-labor would be free, so the cost would go down significantly.</p>
<p>What percentage of the total budget is $16bill? From a quick internet perusal, it looks like the total budget is about $132bill. So cutbacks in the amount of 12% across the board could eliminate the deficit problem. This does not mean that any programs must necessarily be cut in their entirety.</p>
). </p>
Seriously, I fear that far more local infrastructure is going to end up being privatized. We’ve (spouse and I) already taken over responsibility from our city for our street trees, because calling out the city to get a badly overgrown tree trimmed seemed to result in trees just getting chopped down, with no replacements. 
There’s talk of making homeowners responsible for maintaining the sidewalk in front of their homes. Homeowners filling in potholes is probably a pipe dream in some city planner or budgeter’s mind. </p>