Proposed cuts to parks, community colleges should be revised
State legislators have a lot of hard choices to make as they
look for ways to cut the $24 billion deficit, but they have
targeted two areas of the budget
– community colleges and the parks system – without fully
considering the economic gains from these institutions.
Proposed cuts to parks, community colleges should be revised
State legislators have a lot of hard choices to make as they look for ways to cut the $24 billion deficit, but they have targeted two areas of the budget – community colleges and the parks system – without fully considering the economic gains from these institutions.
For San Benito County residents, the hardest immediate hits from the imminent state cuts appear to be two state parks – with the possible closure of Fremont Peak and San Juan Bautista State Historical Park – along with Gavilan College and its share of $825 million in reductions for the community college system.
As expected, they are victims of legislators and bureaucrats’ unobscurely disguised temper tantrums because California voters finally gained the collective sense to say no in the May election.
They are not decisions based on the soundest economic well-being of the citizens. They are based on an attitude that across-the-board cuts make sense as they often do in the business world. The problem is, this isn’t the business world. It is California government, the most inefficient business model on earth.
That means there inevitably is a multitude of overhead and deflated programs that state leaders should examine, that subjectivity in choosing which programs – and for each, to what extent – are on the table.
With the parks, why shut the doors on nearly 80 percent of them statewide – to cut $144 million from a $24 billion deficit – without at all considering how much money will be lost in related tax revenue, and to countless businesses that gain customers from such areas? Why not raise prices for many of those parks and close some of the severely underperforming ones? The answer is, because it wouldn’t leave the same sting for parks users or send the same buzz throughout the media as it does to tell voters that user fees increased to offset shortfalls.
For the community colleges in particular, since many of the teachers are part-time lecturers, they don’t necessarily demand the level of pay in other educational institutions. But if the demand is continually spiking at a place such as Gavilan College, when it is showing its worth beyond numbers in the state books, why not simply raise the fees for the users to offset the additional cost? It would merely cut slightly into the significant subsidy state taxpayers already provide for each of the state’s public schools and colleges.
For education in California as a whole, the most unreasonable cause of ballooning and uncontrollable costs clearly is the overly generous tenure system that continues to weigh upon the financial stability of California schools.
Legislators, instead of pulling at voters’ heartstrings, ultimately should target the tenure system that lays a groundwork across all levels of education for routine, unsubstantiated raises throughout educators’ careers – whether they perform well or not – which inherently curtail the type of incentive that keeps the private sector rolling, which in turn keeps so many state workers employed.
