Unless the budget changes, three of the seven crime prevention coordinators in Seattle will lose their jobs. As for the remaining four coordinators, including the one serving Maple Leaf, no one is sure if they’ll be forced to cut back on their hours or cover larger areas to fill the holes.
One highly visible result could be the elimination of the popular Night Out programs here.
Crime prevention coordinators, civilian employees in the Seattle Police Department, work directly with residents doing everything from setting up block watches to going door to door to warn about recent crimes. They’d been part of the police budget up until last October, when the positions then became paid for with federal grant money that runs out in the spring.
With the help of the nonprofit Common Language Project and communications students at the University of Washington, we take a closer look at what the loss of these coordinators could mean to our neighborhoods.
Continue reading “Crime Prevention Coordinators Face the Budget Axe”.
This is an unfortunate reality that was brought about by poor fiscal management and inflexible state workers unions. City after city and state after state are facing terrible budget deficits. Many of these are driven by a scary trend within this country of gov’t workers becoming unionized. Do you really think that unions, which only make up 7% of the US workforce would get an exemption in the recent healthcare bill for high end insurance plans if it were not for many of those unions being gov’t employees? Other people are taking pay cuts and losing jobs while unions are complaining about pay freezes and COLA freezes. When 75% of city budgets are gobbled up in the payroll and benefits for gov’t workers, we have a serious problem in this country. When we have some transit officers and police officers making well over 150K per year over the last three to four years in King County BEFORE benefits, we have a problem. Don’t believe those numbers, look them up. The link below is for 2007 and many of them have received raises since then. Notice officer Miner and Vowell and think about it is even possible to over 70K in over time? Look at transit operator Calman. Those are just a few examples. When gov’t employees start to make more on average with their benefits than private sector employees, its a recipe for failure. Take Greece for an example.
http://lbloom.net/xking07.html