Restoring and maintaining cut essential services

By Donald J "Don" Greene

Escondido needs a council that will keep its feet on the ground and its head out of the clouds

We have lost our only branch library, a library that had over 70,000 visits per year while only being open 3 days a week - that's an average of 449 visits per day. It would have required $200,000 in funding to keep the branch open. A support organization for the library offered to contribute $100,000 to help keep the branch open. We chose instead to close the branch and reduce the quality of life for the residents of East Escondido.

We have reduced the number of workers on staff in our Public Works department so drastically that we now employ temporary workers for 6-months at a time to maintain the city. We employ them for 6 months to avoid having to pay them benefits. By the time we get one of these employees fully trained, they're contract is terminated. We could employ the people that we need to run our city, but instead we choose to hire temporaries and reduce the quality of life for the residents of Escondido. Our workforce is so depleted, that we rely on a local contractor to fill our potholes once a month.

We - the residents - built Escondido and we deserve the city that we built, not a shadow of its former self. The council must do everything that it can to restore the cut services - hire employees to full complement, restore library services to the East Valley, return City Hall to being open 5 days a week, restore the step increases to our public safety employees and fix and maintain our infrastructure.

We should not settle for wild-eyed dreams of ball parks, soccer stadiums, or high tech business parks. In the names of all those dreams we have spent our money on buying real estate without appraisals. Escondido needs a council that will keep its feet on the ground and its head out of the clouds and get back to restoring Escondido to what it once was - the jewel of North County. Once we've restored our city, then we can get to work on growing effectively and responsibly.