Route 66 icon, Just outside SB
Posted on 08/29/2013 7:38:13 AM PDT by redreno
LOS ANGELES — A federal bankruptcy court judge granted the city of San Bernardino eligibility for bankruptcy protection Wednesday, raising the possibility that the city will propose a plan to dig itself out of debt by cutting money promised to the public pension system.
The ruling by Judge Meredith Jury came despite opposition from the powerful California Public Employees’ Retirement System, more commonly known as CalPERS.
San Bernardino, a working-class city of 240,000 about 60 miles east of Los Angeles, declared Chapter 9 bankruptcy last summer, saying it had effectively run out of money to pay for day-to-day operations, in large part because of pension obligations.
(Excerpt) Read more at lasvegassun.com ...
Only if by "working class", they mean a city in which around 1/3 of the population is on the dole.
Something has to give. You can’t have legions of government workers retiring at 50 with these huge pensions and medical benefits. This problem has been discussed for decades (I recall hearing about it on talk radio when I moved to CA in 1996), but very little has been done about it, maybe a few minor reforms here and there.
Replace the fat pensions with public horse-whippings.
Another Detroit in the making.
Any FReepers live or have lived in SB? What’s your opinion of the place?
A:"About half ..."
The public workers who supported fiscal irresponsibility and fiscally irresponsible politicians should have thought about this before they did.
All of America will take a knife to government pensions because we have known since the nineteen seventies that it would cost too much to set back enough money to cover all those pensions and we quit even trying.
Now the pensions are coming to fruition and the money is not going to suddenly appear.
Ask Doug_From_Upland, he lives nearby ...
I wanted to drive the old Route 66 last year and started in SB toward LA. SB is a shocking dump compared to towns like Rancho Cucamonga, etc. In fact, there is a 'line of demarcation' as you drive old Route 66 when leaving SB, that you suddenly feel like you are in another state.
This should send awakening shock waves through the so-called "Liberal" or "Progressive" enclaves, but don't expect those people to be jolted out of their delusions by anything.
I’d love to live in R. Cucamonga just because of the name. And because Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Mr. Leghorn always mentioned it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygVFbz6AsnE
Route 66 icon, Just outside SB
They had something similar on Hwy 99 in Seattle many decades ago.
http://www.cityofart.net/k2.htm
Check out this ad in SB for a tire dealer - that’s what a lot of SB looks like:
http://www.city-data.com/businesses/626542153-pete-s-discount-tire-san-bernardino-ca.html
It could have been a great place, good climate, citrus groves, snow capped mountains surrounding it, close proximity to many attractions. But it turned into a pit with trashy people, greedy developers ripping out the groves, choking smog blocking out the vistas. McDonald’s began there.
Lived there from 1987 - 1994. Nothing particularly redeeming about the place. My idea of the quintessential ugly urban sprawl. Throw in plenty of empty lots, chain link fences, graffiti, and LA smog rolling in from the east, and you’ve got the picture. One claim to fame - the place where Sammy Davis, Jr. was involved in an auto accident that cost him his right eye.
I grew up (8-18 yrs old) next door to SnBerdoo in Rialto.
The politics of SanBerdoo was always a combination of corruption and tons of voter apathy, with very little and only isolated islands of local pride or great sense of belonging. I left the area in 1968 but have siblings who have remained in the area, and I don’t think the politics or the public spirit of SanBerdoo ever changed.
As bad as the rules of the public pension system there is, in terms of the abuses it permits by the rules, there are a good many city workers and former city workers who both were never part of those abuses and never earned salaries greater than might have been earned in the private sector either. It’s unfortunate that even in their case the promises made were greater than the funding that was actually set aside to fulfill them. A sister has a couple friends who are in that category and they admit to her they would have preferred weaker promises upon which their own actions over the years would have been different but now their small pensions too will likely be hit as well. I tell her I can fully understand their position but I understand too the financial dilemna the city of SanBerdoo now has, with NO solution capable of satisfying everyone, and no responsibility legally or morally for wealth or income from outside SanBerdoo to make anything any better.
It’s a hard lesson local taxpayers everywhere need to wake up to.
Long before my youth in the area there was a “Rancho Cucamonga” - which originated as an actual Spanish/Mexican rancho/land grant to a Spanish/Mexican settler (mercantilist/crony capitalist).
Then in my youth there was simply the area known as Cucamonga (a sixteen mile bike ride down old Rt 66 from my home then) and the areas north of it called Alta Loma and Etiwanda. Then sometime later (1977) Cucamonga, Alta Loma and Etiwanda became incorporated together as the modern day city of Rancho Cucamonga.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rancho_Cucamonga
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