Let’s go back more than six years ago. Candidate Dan Herbert was running for office and said the city was dangerously spending its reserves. Councilor Andy Holcombe was granted extra space in a “guest comment” in the local weekly newspaper to discredit Herbert.
His piece, headlined “Budget monster — fact or fiction?” made it clear Holcombe thought it was fiction. Holcombe got elected one more time, two years later, on the denial platform.
Let’s go back to last fall.
During the City Council race, Ann Schwab said of the city’s financial situation: “No, the city isn’t in dire trouble.” She bragged that the general fund was balanced without mentioning that other funds were running huge deficits to make the general fund look better. She was the leading vote-getter.
Of the candidates who were most adamant that the sky was falling — Sean Morgan, Toby Schindelbeck, Bob Evans, Dave Donnan and Andrew Coolidge — only one got elected. People didn’t want to hear the truth, that the sky indeed was falling.
The editor of the local weekly, a few days before the election, lit into Evans for a campaign ad placed in his publication.
“Reading it,” Robert Speer wrote in his column, “you’d think the council and city staff had driven the city to the brink of bankruptcy in recent years while failing to do anything whatsoever about economic development. That’s simply not true, and Evans knows it.”
Evans was right. A lot of good it did him.
Morgan was the only one among those mean fiscal watchdogs who got elected. He finished third for four seats. During the campaign, he said he decided to run when he couldn’t get the information he wanted about the city finances.
He said he was told, “That would take a lot of time, and you wouldn’t understand it if I gave it to you.”
“Who fires the person who said that?” Morgan said, when speaking to our editorial board.
The person who said that, finance director Jennifer Hennessy, didn’t need to get fired. She saw the handwriting on the wall and took another job first.
The Enterprise-Record editorial board wrote before the election, “The budget is enormously out of whack,” and, “The council needs people who treat our dollars like their dollars.” Of the four councilors we recommended, only one (Morgan) was elected. People didn’t want to hear the truth. It’s too hard.
Two years before that, we wrote in another endorsement editorial: “The city has to cut about $6.7 million in the next couple of years to get the budget back in balance. There’s talk of laying off police officers and firefighters … Yet millions are spent to buy property that is then fenced off from the public, or contaminated with pollutants. Tens of thousands go to public art, diversity plans, climate action plans … and a wealth of other feel-good endeavors.”
And in the election before that, we wrote: “Recent poor economic decisions go far beyond salaries and benefits for city employees. The council spent lavishly on studies and consultants while doing very little to improve parks. It authorized $600,000 for a Bidwell Park plan that doesn’t spend one cent on park improvements. It spent millions for land presented as ‘open space.’ … It spent more time discussing global warming than job creation. … It paid a developer $9.5 million after the council’s wrong-headed inaction on cleaning up the Humboldt Road burn dump.”
You get the idea.
The only people who should be surprised by the city’s cash crisis are the ones who haven’t been paying attention — or choose to believe in wishful thinking.
This is one of the best writen, most fair and balanced editorials I’ve ever read in the ER! David Little nails it. He researched his story very well, sorted out the facts and then dared to tell the truth and the truth is so refreshing to hear these days. Good job David!
PS No doubt, he’s made a lot of liberals very uncomfortable with this story, but they had it coming.