San Berdoo declares bankruptcy

“In an earlier report to the council, [Acting City Manager] Travis-Miller said the city has faced declining revenues and escalating retirement costs, with employee compensation accounting for about 75 percent of the city’s general fund spending.

“A bankruptcy filing would reopen negotiations on employee contracts but would not invalidate its pension payments, which Mayor Pat Morris and others have said are the main cause of the city’s financial problem.”

So even now, with the pensions causing the bankruptcy, the pensions won’t get changed. That shows the ultimate power of the government-worker unions: Their greed caused the bankruptcy, but even after the bankruptcy their greed remains unabated.

San Berdoo is the third California city to file for bankruptcy since Stockton did it on June 28, and Mammoth Lakes followed on July 2.

That’s three city bankruptcies in 13 days, or one every 4.3 days. At that rate, 212 California municipalities out of 482 will file bankruptcy by the time Brown’s term ends in January 2015.

Brian Calle also has reported on our site on how Los Angeles is close to bankruptcy. And Stanton may be headed that way as well.

When he took office in January 2011, Brown immediately should have called a special election to enact a reform plank with two elements: 1) Restoring the Gann Limit, which limited spending increases to the increases in population plus inflation, but was repealed by misled voters in 1990. 2) Major pension reform.

Instead, he has been begging and maneuvering for an $8.5 billion tax increase, Proposition 30 on the November ballot, to pay for $5 billion in new splurge spending in his fiscal 2012-13 budget, which began on July 1. It will only make matters worse.

And Brown advanced a modest, 12-point pension-reform plan only in the Democratic-controlled Legislature, which has spiked it at the behest of its government-union masters.

The bankruptcies will continue.