Public Opinion is Manipulated by Misinformation
Today, some people in Glendale defend water and electric rate increases arguing that those increases are needed to defraying the costs for water importing and infrastructure replacement and repair. These people are completely ignoring facts to the contrary. These people knowingly, or unknowingly, are actually supporting special interests and manipulating public opinion.
For years, the Glendale city government has being starving the utilities and neglecting the infrastructure. Instead of using the utility fees for the utilities, the City has used the fees for blotted salaries and pensions in other city departments.
Almost half of the city’s expenditures go to two departments; and they are not Libraries, Parks and Recreation, nor are they housing, community welfare or even Public Works. Those two departments are Police and Fire. The unions of these two city departments have managed in the past ten years to convince the City to double and triple those departments’ budgets. Ironically, this has happened while the population of Glendale has decreased during those past ten years.
Police and Fire departments in neighboring cities have had only moderate increases in costs due to improvements in public safety across the Country. In Glendale, crime has diminished and major structure fires have come down to an average of six per year. So why did Glendale’s costs for Police and Fire increase exponentially?
Yes, it is easy to manipulate public opinion; all you have to do is use scare tactics, argue urgency and use mass media. Police and Fire are buzz words to use to get citizens to support increased spending by the City. City management has the resources to fund such a manipulation of public opinion; they have the money, the access to the media and a well organized team of public unions. The exception now is that we have the Internet and we can access a large amount of public information and actually see what the City is doing.
The choice is yours, let Government continue unchecked and taxes grow, or become informed and involved.
Authored by Frank Gallo and John Samuel.
