Letter: South Lake Tahoe and its streets
To the community,
I am presently very concerned that the City Council now intends to not fund maintenance of city streets.
Consider my points:
1. Since Measure C has failed, the City Council can now shift blame of our streets in disrepair upon the voters.
2. If the street repairs were now adequately funded, this would be like an admission that the funds were available before the Measure C proposal.
The “no” voters were correct in their votes. Math, tells us why. Nancy Kerry had made it public knowledge that the city employees’ retirement benefits would rise in the coming years from $4.7 million to $9.7 million by year 2022. Measure C was expected to raise only $2.5 million per year. Measure C was clearly not an answer to our problem. The problem would return again before year 2022.
One most obvious solution to the problem is to reduce the city employees’ retirement packages. Nancy Kerry has now decided to eliminate retirement health care. But in my opinion, our City Council will not act to allocate funds for street repairs. At the community talk (at Y coffee shop) Tom Davis was asked: “Are street repairs on City Council’s agenda?” The answer came back “no.”
If you think through all of this, you’ll arrive at the same conclusion that I have. I want the citizens to understand what’s going on, so I want this all made public. If we continue to wait, we’ll lose another year.
Daniel Harvey, South Lake Tahoe homeowner