Contract City II / Costa Mesa California for The New Yorker

Contract City II / Costa Mesa California for The New Yorker

From the New Yorker abstract “Letter from California” by tad friend about the battle over the city of Costa Mesa’s budget. Costa Mesa has no apparent center: If there’s a there here, it’s unclear where. What served as a civic nucleus, until recently, was city hall. The five-story glass-and-white-brick box is home to many of the municipality’s four hundred and ninety-seven employees. But City hall is now under fire from the budget-slashing wing of the republican establishment, in a war of words and pink slips reminiscent of an earlier anti-union era, when the pinkertons battered the wobblies with fists and clubs. Local budget deficits are a national problem. Cities are where people will actually feel the results of the argument over the country’s fiscal future, and american cities are running deficits of some fourteen billion dollars a year. One glaring contributor to the problem is growing pension payments. Cities can’t look to their states for help: A recent study estimated that there was a $1.26-trillion funding gap in state workers’ retirement benefits, countrywide (with California responsible for an eighth of that).