Another U.S. city mulls bankruptcy due to soaring wages and pensions

[LooseWilly]

19. I suspect that optimistic projections were only a part of the problem- can you say RDA?

Not surprisingly, a quick search on the city of Desert Hot Springs reveals that they had a ReDevelopment Agency in place.

http://www.cityofdhs.org/RDA_Documents

And, what does an RDA do? It combats "urban blight" (and a city named Desert Hot Springs probably faced a "whole lot of" urban blight... but that's another issue entirely)... by designating zones of the city for redevelopment and then diverting the property tax dollars to build shopping mall infrastructures to draw retail business to town (bribe corporate entities to come and provide mostly minimum wage jobs and provide a boost on sales tax revenue... which is ostensibly "supposed to" offset all the property tax dollars that would otherwise go to the state in order to be pooled and then re-distributed back to local counties and municipalities)... and the RDAs then negotiate with these corporate entities to come up with terms to convince them to set up shop in these shopping centers, built to their specs in some cases.

It is unclear what sorts of tax breaks are further offered to the businesses in an effort to fill the malls.

What do you want to bet that the city needed to provide all those "expensive" city services (workers) largely in order to provide infrastructure and support for these corporate negotiation teams... all in pursuit of some sales tax dollars, while "investing" (squandering?) all those diverted tax dollars into what amounts to corporate subsidies... dollars which otherwise could've been distributed throughout the state?

And, as a corollary, how willing do you suppose a municipality would be to levy a tax rate that would actually support the services expected by these corporate tenants, in the face of the threat of them walking and leaving the RDA holding the bag for all the construction costs of all those shiny shopping mall would-be-corporate-bribes?

As an added bonus, in every case I've seen the RDA board has consisted exactly of the city council... who usually pay themselves a bonus rate for all the RDA meetings... though I haven't bothered with the 5 minutes of effort to confirm that in this particular case.

No, I don't think the public employees who negotiated a contract for their work, and now expect to have the city management & council pay the terms of those contracts... I don't think it is the employees that should be seen as the ones responsible for Desert Hot Springs' ... hot water.