Any of This Sound Familiar?

Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?

• The city of Vallejo is on the brink of becoming the first California city ever to declare bankruptcy, City Council members said Tuesday.
• [Council member] Gomes said the situation has been building for more than a decade.
• "This has been happening for quite a while. For 15 years the city council has been putting Band-Aids on the problem. (It has been) extending contracts and deferring payments for public safety to the next years as a way of balancing the current budget." Public safety contracts for police and fire services make up 80 percent of the city's general fund. "We've been spending more than we've been making for 20 years and it's time to pay the piper," Gomes said.

Deferring payments - where have we seen that before? Oh yeah - Chicago. How to alleviate the situation?

• Vallejo Finance Director Rob Stout projected that without deep cuts, including assumed agreements negotiated with police and fire departments by June 30, the City will be $6 million in debt and will have spent every last penny of its $4 million in reserves. Gomes said the city has a plan to cut $20 million out of the budget in the next year. That emergency spending plan could devastate city services. The police and fire unions must agree on the spending cuts before it can be considered.
• The plan calls for cutting city salaries to 5 percent lower than June 30, 2007 starting on March 28. Police and firefighter salaries under the existing labor agreements would be reduced 15 percent [...] A single fire engine company would be closed each day on a rotating basis and there would be a three-month temporary reduction in truck company staffing from four to three.

That could never happen here, right? Well if you hop over to this link here (the 2008 Public Safety Budget) and go to page 9, you'll see that the City has already cut $20 million from the Police Budget alone along with 102 salaried positions. Where those spots came from, we have no idea, but we suspect most came from where we work.

In any case, that $20 million (and the other tens of millions "saved" from other Departments) isn't going to our underfunded pensions or vehicles or radios or M-4s or training or anything like that. It's going to bloated construction contracts, over priced cameras, crooked truck scandals and payouts for all sorts of lawsuits. And we suspect Daley's end game (or the end game he leaves his successor) is eventual bankruptcy to gut the contracts and pensions of everyone when the cycle of tax hikes and deferred payments overtakes the financial realities of this house of cards.