The poor darlings of San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency may soon lose their free parking privileges. Oh, the horror!
On the bright side, the monthly income of psychologists in the city is sure to skyrocket when these same employees seek counseling for this atrocity! P.S. Undoubtedly, such services are almost certainly paid for by taxpayer dollars. 🙁
Meanwhile, across the bay, Berzerkeley is set to offer their employees free sex changes.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2011%2F01%2F17%2FBA1P1HA3JL.DTL
Kind of a “Got Ya” since no doubt some of the transit workers have to get to work to start the first run of the day or get home from the last run. In the real world, nobody should be surprised at anything governments will be resorting to in order to get more money. Pay toilets at city hall will not be too far behind! Alas, a tax by any other name still nails you in the wallet.
I object to the ‘settled’ notion that more people should use public transit!
In Edmonton city workers pay for their own parking.
Its the management that gets the gravy. Hell their even paid for mileage to work. Not so the regular Joe.
So when you read these things remember its usually the cream of the City bureaucrats , not the workers who get these free bee’s.
All paid by less services to the public at your expense, to extract even more from the taxpayer. for an Elite.
JMO
I weep for them and by weep I mean laugh.
That is one way to raise money – the workers who have the pensions, inflated wages and health benefits can contribute to their common good. Just negotiate compensation for the parking fees in the union contract – or at least co-pay. Circular thinking at its best. Cheers.
Since Fernstalbert DID mention health benefits, one of my best friends is a retired nurse here in B.C.
I am a small business person.
She showed me a prescription she recently had filled for ‘Nexium’. My cost would have been $211.21, but she paid only …. $0.49.
Yes, forty-nine cents.
No wonder the living standards of public sector workers remain constant (or better) while those of the private sector slowly shrink. The rest of us are subsidizing tens of thousands of retired ‘public sector’ workers at every level, from federal to municipal. And I see no sign of that trend abating.
One of the truly ironic realities of life is that the majority of the population think that recirculated $ = a viable economy. The consumption of wealth = a viable economy.
A government employee can go on add nauseum about the value they add to the equation. As most of us on here realize this public perception is now faced with the ugly reality that their conviction has no basis.
The layoffs in Camden, NJ the other day should have sent shockwaves across the USA and Canada but received little coverage. Why? Those who live off the system cannot afford to have reality become common knowledge.
Courtesy of Michael Phillips, we discover: “The stimulus money generated in Washington that came to San Francisco was used entirely to subsidize the pensions of city employees.”
http://phillips.blogs.com/goc/2010/11/the-stimulus-money-found.html
We had a civil servant here complain that they had to pay for parking in Ottawa, while civil servants in small remote communities and stations did not. For awhile there, they were going to charge for parking on every government site, regardless of location, so if you were the radio tech travelling to your work at the Loran C radio site at Riske creek in the middle of nowhere you would have to pay to park, or park off of the site, which is 1/2km walk down a gravel road. Luckily the stupidity died a natural death, you pay for parking downtown. In fact the Feds recently reviewed the amount of “free” parking and people authorized to use their vehicles for work and slashed it by around 50% in the large centres.
Actually quite a few companies give free parking to their employees and then pass that onto the customer as part of the price of their goods or services.