COMMUNITY FORUM: Letters

THE ISSUE

Last week’s election will have lasting effects in Colorado Springs. Response to the vote has ranged from “we showed them,” to “now you’ve really messed things up.”

In The Gazette’s final installment of the Community Forum page dedicated to the election, we offer commentary from your fellow citizens and voters. Because of the failure of 2C and the passage of Issue 300, city budget decisions will necessarily focus on the city’s payroll.

Leaders must sacrifice

I have to say that I am very disappointed in the leadership and fiscal organization of Colorado Springs. Failing to pass 2C to fund police, fire, low cost community centers is an abomination. However, failed by the people, I can only complain about my fellow citizens not appreciating the safety and necessity of these services.

I am actually writing to complain about the way our city government wastes money, then makes us decide what important things we need to sacrifice. For instance, if each of city leaders including City Manager Penelope Culbreth-Graft took a small pay cut from say $210,000 annually to $150,000, we could save one community center, or two new police officers or a firefighter. Sixty-seven city employees make at least $100,000 a year, if we lowered that to $80,000 a year, that saves the city $1.34 million a year, clearly doing a lot of good and still affording a modest living for our leaders.

I am just asking the local citizens to wake up to the frivolous spending on the downtown art and building makeovers, building fountains and then making us donate to save them and stop overpaying our city administration and demand a better performance from them.

Jeremy Gianzero

Colorado Springs

Time for city to buckle down

Good job, voters, on sending a message to city government to stand accountable. I am appalled at the level of whining from city officials on their budget woes. Who doesn’t need to reevaluate their budget and spending patterns in these times?

Stop trying to pass on budget/spending irresponsibility by scaring citizens with your list of prosposed cuts. Get to work and cut excess rather than asking for more money by increasing taxes; get creative rather than blindly axing programs just to get the numbers to work out.

Have you seen the movie, “Dave?” My favorite scene is the “president’s” budget meeting where creative financing cuts $650 million from an overstuffed budget. Dave’s (the “president”) line, “Why do we need to spend millions of dollars in advertising getting people to feel good about cars they already bought?” And the line about defense contractors being paid on time for jobs that haven’t been finished, Dave says, “hold back the cash and put it in an interest-bearing account.”

Money management is only part of the job; tough choices will have to be made, and I’m sure they can be made with some intelligent, in-depth, creative looks at city financing.

Sharla Davis

Colorado Springs

City should heed voters

I’ve just observed Issue 2C going down in flames. This reflects the fact we don’t support the City Council’s and Police Department’s priorities. The CSPD continues to waste police time on strip clubs, smokers in bars, and other non-problems. The latest outrage is the attack on medical marijuana providers by CSPD and the district attorney’s office. Must we pass another state constitutional provision before they understand the clear will of the electorate?

The council lost our trust through the use of certificates of participation to circumvent the need to obtain voter approval for debt. Their tacit approval of CSPD enforcement priorities did not help. When CSPD feels the need to send detectives to a strip club trolling for violations on our tax dollars, some one needs to tell them to stop. Council did not do that job.

We, the voters, will tell the council and CSPD our priorities. Their jobs are to obey, quit or be fired. I think we are going to see some law enforcement people lose their jobs.

To our friends in the Fire Department, you need to unhitch your wagon from CSPD. We will fund you.

Ralph S. Hoefelmeyer

Colorado Springs

Get rid of dead wood

I wish to thank all of those citizens who voted for Issue 300 and against 2C. The time has long passed for the City Council to show respect for the voters in lieu of developers and big business. Now let us vote for people who will respect our desires. Keep Darryl Glen, Tom Gallagher and Sean Paige in office and vote out the rest. We are on a roll, don’t let it stop here.

This city will survive and thrive according to our plans and not to those of corporate America. To City Council, start working with and using Doug Bruce and his talent instead of fighting him. Had he endorsed a small but needed tax increase, it would have passed easily. And listen to and stop fighting the voters.

Timothy Okey

Colorado Springs

Workers not exempt from cuts

I can stay silent no longer. Why do city employees think they are exempt from this down economy? I wish every city employee would hear my story and reconsider their stance.

I am college educated and had a job earning about $48k per year. I was laid off as a direct result of the economy. I was out of work for almost a year and received the sum of $431 pre-tax weekly, with no benefits, from the state of Colorado for unemployment (which eventually ran out). After paying into the fund all of my adult life and never using the benefit for more than 25 years, that is the most I was entitled to.

Unlike some of our city leaders, I do not own an expensive home in another state while purchasing yet another expensive home in an affluent part of Colorado Springs. I live in a two-bedroom, one-bath home that’s less than 1,000 sq. ft.

Colorado Springs has always been a low-wage town and I could not even find a job for $10 per hour, being told constantly that I was “overqualified.”

The $1,700 pre-tax monthly unemployment benefit did not even cover my mortgage payment and car payment. After living for decades within my means, I was forced to file bankruptcy. After almost a year out of work, I finally was offered a job that paid me 60 percent less than I was previously earning.

I would have jumped at the chance to keep my previous job and take only a 10-percent pay cut. I would not have been forced into bankruptcy and had to live through a year of extreme stress.

Get a grip, city employees. We live in a town, not a city. Take away our military and Colorado Springs has virtually no industry to sustain it. I will trade places with you and take that pay cut. I would still be earning more than I do now and actually have benefits, which my new employer does not offer.

Whatever happened to “lead by example?” We are all in this together.

Anita Trujillo

Colorado Springs

Taxpayers have right to know

I guess it’s understandable why Barry Noreen would argue the appropriateness of publishing names and salaries of city employees as a press freedom issue, because he’s a journalist (“Please don’t shoot the messenger,” The Gazette, Oct. 27).

Unfortunately, he missed the more salient point to be made: public employees serve the public, are paid with public tax dollars and consequently, taxpayers have a right to know their salaries. Compensation privacy doesn’t, and should never exist in the public domain — for officeholder or bureaucrat alike.

It can’t really be any other way in our republic, though public employee unions and their political cronies elsewhere have managed to “privatize” the public sector for their own purposes and hold their communities hostage to their immoral conduct (such as lavish salaries and pensions, all paid with tax dollars). Fearful of union retribution, media in New York, New Jersey, Illinois and Washington have turned away from their watchdog role which has helped public employees in these states loot their public treasuries and create unfunded pension liabilities for decades to come. Taxpayers (both individual and corporate) are fleeing these cesspools, which will obviously compound their fiscal crisis.

Because of TABOR and its requirement that tax increases be put to a public vote (thus making it more difficult to fool all of the people all of the time), the public employee unions have found Colorado infertile to their unfettered expansion here; ponder that aspect of this controversial law next time you consider its worth.

Chuck Fowler

Colorado Springs

Cut high-end salaries

After viewing the city salaries on The Gazette’s Web site, I think it’s time to blow the city’s threats of closures and firings out of the water.

I noticed as I scrolled through the first few pages of the list that there are quite a few city workers making way over $80,000 a year. In my opinion, any city worker making over $80,000 a year, and I don’t care what position it is, should get a major cut in salary and learn to live on less like the private sector has to.

The city wants to cut salaries of those making $40,000 per year or less while the former get to keep their salaries. This is totally unfair to those making lower wages.

It’s time those with high-end salaries take the brunt of the current economic problem and leave the lower-end salaries alone. It would help the budget considerably if these high salaries were brought down to more reasonable levels so we can keep the Police and Fire departments fully manned and the parks and museums open and maintained as they should be.

Most people here live on a great deal less and still manage to pay their bills. It’s time the city elites did their duty by doing the same as everyone else here.

As an afterthought, I think the mayor’s salary is a total disgrace. I don’t know why anyone would want to be mayor, put up with a lot of public scrutiny and be paid so piddling an amount.

Val Tenhaeff

Colorado Springs

Gazette gave city a break

The Gazette really needs to go back and get more data from the city. It is good for The Gazette to make salaries of city employees widely available and then compare city salaries to the actual average wages earned by the citizens being served and protected (“Most city workers make well above average wage,” Oct. 24).

Note that the average wages paid for all workers in El Paso County must have included, overtime, incentive pay and bonus pay, and was compared to the base pay of city workers. It would be good if The Gazette would go back to the city and request the annual amounts actually paid in 2008 to all city employees and compare to average data for El Paso County for a similar time period.

Even then the higher paid city employees will skew the average of the county compared to non-city employees. Thus far, The Gazette is really giving the city employees a break on the comparison.

John Norris

Colorado Springs

WHAT'S AHEAD

On Nov. 15 The Gazette’s Community Forum will return to its regular format. On that day, the Opinion page staff will field questions from readers about how we do our jobs. If you want to know how we select letters or columns for publication, ask and we’ll answer. Have you ever wondered where the Freedom Philosophy came from? Now’s the time to ask.

You can e-mail us at opinion@ gazette.com; fax in your submission to 636-0202, or through the U.S. mail at Letters to the Editor, P.O. Box 1779, Colorado Springs, CO 80901. Please mark your submission as pertaining to the Community Forum issue. Comments must be received at The Gazette by the close of business on Wednesday, to be included in the package.

Nov. 22: Media regulation. Some politicians have proposed the radical idea of bring back the Fairness Doctrine, which would force television and radio stations to balance their presentations of issues. Would this improve political debate or simply water it down? Tell everyone what you think.