So while the rest of you worry whether your job will exist tomorrow or how you'll pay your mortgage rest easy tonight knowing you are building retirement income for government employees here in our community. How about a fund to fix the potholes Bob? How about a fund to help neighborhoods clean up foreclosed homes Bob?
Because Governments never live in reality, in the real world, we are all a witness to the Gateway Services District building itself into an empire. Not a media empire like I'm building, but a spending empire. It's being built brick-by-brick by Operations Manager Bill Knight and rubber stamped by Board Chairman, Bob Nielson. Thursday night the board will consider renewing the 71 page document that guarantees we the taxpayer will pad the pension fund 6% of the employee's salary. It's another one of those things they are going to try to sneak by you. The fund already has about $100,000 of your money in it.
If you read Florida Statute 190 which created a CDD, it's plain and simple "to provide a reasonable alternative for the establishment, power, operation, and duration of independent districts to manage and finance basic community development services". How does providing a pension plan to government workers qualify in any way as basic community services? Only in Bob's world, it does.
This type of setup just gives credence to the growing belief that a government job is a job for life. A job at GM or GE or Ford isn't even considered a job for life anymore. They, the government, will argue that you just can't find good people if you don't pad their pockets with all these goodies. Well, I have an idea. The GSD should send out one blast e-mail advertising Operations Manager $60,000 per year, no benefits, no pension. Their mailbox would bleed good resume's. Besides I thought money couldn't buy happiness!
NEW POLL. LOOK LEFT. SHOULD TAXPAYERS BUILD A PENSION FUND?
From Wetland 47 to attending unbudgeted seminars to overspending on engineers and the attorney's.
The GSD is not providing basic services, it has become a self-fulfilling prophesy. It's a seed that grows upon itself. Government should be providing basic services, that's all. If we keep allowing Bob and Bill and the others to grow the size of the CDD it will never be able to be unraveled. A CDD was not meant to be never-ending.
The goal should always be to figure out how to operate with less, not more. What we are allowing to be built here is a conglomerate run by people with no issue at all with how tax dollars are being spent. A pension plan. You have got to be kidding me. Governments should not, on any level, be setting up pension plans or 401K plans with tax dollars. It's criminal. If people want to invest for retirement let them do it with money from their salary, not money from our pockets. Money they have never earned. Money the taxpayers deserve to spend any way they decide.
It's absurd I tell you, absurd.
