The San Francisco Weekly ran a superb article titled: The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S. by Ben Wachs and Joe Eskenazi. Its about San Francisco of course.
With a tiny selection of terrible examples from the new home for seniors being down-sized from 1,200 bed to 800 with a 50% cost over-run in the construction to the rampaging psychotic youth in the same home for seniors... to the paralysis in dealing with budget explosions.... Wachs and Eskenazi do a first rate job of proving their point. There are 20 more and better examples, such as driving out 25 big companies that started in S.F. and driving out 70 biotech firms that originated here.
My favorite disaster story is the high pay and steady increase in wages and benefits for the fire department that has more than 3 times the number of stations and employees as are needed since fires now occur 25% as often as they did in 1965 and are less severe.
The two SF Weekly authors blame the S.F. unions for the disaster and the absence of a strong CAO (Chief Administrator) in the City.
I beg to differ. The unions in S.F. have always been strong but they were not important after the mid-1950s when they began losing the ability to call a strike and keep other unions from crossing picket lines.
Mayor Willie Brown's emasculation of the CAO, was part of the disaster as was his hiring 1,000 of his cronies (mostly black); but the most devastating disaster for the city was the return of district elections in 2000. Nobody now represents the whole City. Nobody. The board of supervisors are each pigs trying to pour tax money into their own trough and district elections have made unions with their paltry number of foot-soldiers powerful again.
Give the citizens a few city-wide supervisors and most of the local insanity could be reduced.
With a tiny selection of terrible examples from the new home for seniors being down-sized from 1,200 bed to 800 with a 50% cost over-run in the construction to the rampaging psychotic youth in the same home for seniors... to the paralysis in dealing with budget explosions.... Wachs and Eskenazi do a first rate job of proving their point. There are 20 more and better examples, such as driving out 25 big companies that started in S.F. and driving out 70 biotech firms that originated here.
My favorite disaster story is the high pay and steady increase in wages and benefits for the fire department that has more than 3 times the number of stations and employees as are needed since fires now occur 25% as often as they did in 1965 and are less severe.
The two SF Weekly authors blame the S.F. unions for the disaster and the absence of a strong CAO (Chief Administrator) in the City.
I beg to differ. The unions in S.F. have always been strong but they were not important after the mid-1950s when they began losing the ability to call a strike and keep other unions from crossing picket lines.
Mayor Willie Brown's emasculation of the CAO, was part of the disaster as was his hiring 1,000 of his cronies (mostly black); but the most devastating disaster for the city was the return of district elections in 2000. Nobody now represents the whole City. Nobody. The board of supervisors are each pigs trying to pour tax money into their own trough and district elections have made unions with their paltry number of foot-soldiers powerful again.
Give the citizens a few city-wide supervisors and most of the local insanity could be reduced.