While many communities are fearfully contemplating extensive cuts, Maywood says it is the first city in the nation in the current downturn to take an ax to everyone.
The school crossing guards were let go. Parking enforcement was contracted out, City Hall workers dismissed, street maintenance workers made redundant. The public safety duties of the Police Department were handed over to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
At first, people in this poor, long-troubled and heavily Hispanic city southeast of Los Angeles braced for anarchy.
Senior citizens were afraid they would be assaulted as they walked down the street. Parents worried the parks would be shut and their children would have nowhere to safely play. Landlords said their tenants had begun suggesting that without city-run services they would no longer feel obliged to pay rent.
The apocalypse never arrived.
Sounds to me like the town is letting the neighboring towns do its work. What would happen if all the towns did this?
And. . . .then the sky fell:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-07-20/california-official-s-800-000-salary-in-city-of-38-000-triggers-protests.html
This is the community where my wife worked as a teacher and administrator for years, where I have taught and occasionally preached at the local Lutheran church and where my kids went to pre-school. There is a lot of back story that did not make it into this article. If you want to get a better sense of what’s going on in this part of LA County (Huntington Park, Maywood, Cudahy, Bell, South Gate and — what the h***— Vernon) just google “salary” and Bell to see that the city manager of the neighboring city pulled in $800,000 per annum. Vernon is a family fiefdom where the industrial tax base serves one or two families rather than the neighborhoods of its tens of thousands of factory workers. Corruption and cronyism ride on the backs of working folk that are the salt of the earth. The evil in this transition to outsourcing is that the folk that actually work lose their health insurance and retirements to support the thieves in Bell and the private contractors in Maywood; in both cases the upper tier live far outside the neighborhood raising the taxes to pay them.
That the sheriff is taking over Maywood’s policing is a good thing . . . you’d have to know the history to understand.
The City of Bell … one of the providers of the outsourced services … has a huge scandal brewing. There is rarely a simple answer to good government.