Kudos to Richard Rider for taking on the Mayoral spokesperson.
She seems to be beside herself at how he could have the audacity to call out the pro-sales tax side for threatening voters by trotting out the police and fire chief as political pawns and telling people that their lives are at risk if they don’t capitulate to increasing taxes.
This is one of my absolute pet peeves that I’ve written about on this site before. The fact that the populous is not in more of an absolute uproar over the authoritarian muscle-flex by the Mayor and the public employee labor unions he teamed up with is beyond me.
Is the Mayor (or his spokesperson) looking at San Diegans with a straight face and saying they will choose to cut public safety services while the City budget funds something like public art?
Why did the Mayor choose to trot out the public safety chiefs and not the public art director to threaten people that public art was at risk without additional sales tax revenue?
Or why didn’t the Mayor propose that the City stop giving firefighters a bonus for doing a desk job? Of course these options wouldn’t have fit in to their playbook. The choice had to be framed as service and safety cuts, not reforms to spending practices.
Rather than threatening people with their lives, the more honest conversation would have been something like this:
“Voters, you can either bail us out with a tax increase, or we are going to have to implement reforms that you’ve been asking we do for years that are going to make the labor unions and City Council very unhappy. So pretty please, pony up more tax dollars because we would rather not make difficult decisions that we were elected to make.”
Thank goodness voters read between the lines, and thank you to Richard Rider for standing up to the threats.