This past week, Q-line asked:
The City Council recently revealed that it will be facing significant reductions in revenue during the next couple of years. The Board of Education, too, has expressed fears that the next few budget cycles are going to be tough all around. If cuts have to be made to services, which do you feel should be first to go under the knife?
Here are your responses:
“Now that is a no-brainer. Stop giving the city budget away to the bums, criminals and crazies that keep pouring into Santa Monica, those that travel here on their own and those who are dumped here daily from outside areas. Despite John Maceri’s aversion to the terminology, Santa Monica is bum-haven, the home of the homeless, skid row by the sea, and on and on. More transients, more social workers, more police, more localist housing sprawled throughout our city — put that money to repairing the infrastructure for the citizens. Whose town is it anyway? Or I should say, was.”
“If they want to save money they can stop spending so much money on the bums. The other thing they could do is fire the people in charge of designing traffic patterns because they’re incompetent. They don’t know what they’re doing anyway. That would save money by not having to spend money on more curb extensions and stupid things like that that only mess traffic up more than it’s already messed up.”
“If budget cuts have to made in services, then all services should be cut equally. Thereafter, the people who are complaining would all be complaining equally.”
“I vote for the first cut to be all Council members except [Kevin] McKeown. Without them, instead of hundreds of thousands being spent on the murder of trees, it could go to the important things, like better education for our children. Since McKeown is the only member who listens to the people, we can be guaranteed that we would finally have our city run properly. So who needs the others?”
“It is the responsibility of Santa Monica’s city employees and political community to police and maintain the common area of the city. The basic responsibilities being trash collection, street maintenance, police and fire departments, all to be maintained in good working order. These services are paid for with the city’s share of property taxes, gasoline taxes, sales taxes and income taxes, fees and fines. As long as these basic common area services are met, I have no problem cutting out the frill that is not self-supporting.”
“I think the city should cut out paying thousands of dollars to consultants for different projects that they have going on in the city. I think that if research needs to be done, the city employees who are already getting paid and the council members should do their own research work.”
“Gosh. With over a half a billion dollar bloated budget, the city needs to cut back severely. Nix the school district obscene salaries of so-called specialist consultants and elective-arts funding providing a private school education with public tax-payer money. The City Council, school board and SMC never saw a tax dollar that they could use in wasteful spending. In all three entities, you have not one person with vision or understanding of useless spending of hard-earned tax-payer dollars.”
“Tree-removal services.”
“The city forester, who never met a tree he didn’t want to kill.”
“We certainly could cut the many expensive out-of-town consultants that are routinely hired by the city.”
“I think there are quite a few things that should be cut, but I will cut them down to first, no light rail coming to Santa Monica. We have already enough crazy people making our city filthy.”
“Any service to anyone that cannot prove that they are a legal citizen of the United States of America.”
“I’m not sure which reduction should take place, but it definitely should not be in the field of education. An educated populous should be the nation’s highest priority.”
“Why not cut out the City Council?”
