But how long before Wheeler gets his picture taken cutting the ribbon on some county-funded eco-roof? I give it six months max.

Simply amazing.

Walking downtown (I wouldn't dare drive) is like an old Hollywood "Zombie Night" B-movie. The addicts and homeless appear to outnumber the non-afflicted.

Also: the Kitchen Kaboodle across the street from the Macy's construction zone is leaving that location after 17 years. And there are several vacancies on both sides of Macy's on 6th street.

What will become of the Meth Mall if there are no shoppers to spang?

So no more CHIERS? Are they out of their minds?

I just read that the city is going to replace all of the ticket vending machines on the Eastside Max with brand new "Debit/Credit card only" machines, at a cost of only 1.7 million dollars. Just imagine, there you are, stuck out there in East County Hell for some reason late at night, and all you have is cash to pay with. Too bad.

Look around at all of the people who have been watching you dig through your stuff as the train recedes in the distance.

Heh, I make plenty of money off of people who get genuinely creeped out by the many colorful denziens of our public transportation system.

Downtown...ha ha ha, I work down there. It truly does resemble Night of the Living Dead. And now the city is gonna chuck all those detoxing junkies and winos from the Hooper right out into the street, while the place is torn up for years. There certainly aren't any jail beds for them, it seems, so the cops aren't going to be of much help. Downtown is certainly about to get a lot more interesting, that's for sure.

The night I first watched our ceaselessly gluttonous local government cynically manipulate voter fear by televising the early release of career criminals was quite a revelation, personally. They never give up with this crap, do they ?

If this goes down, I'm applying for a concealed carry permit. Fiending junkies get really reckless, and my job is super-dangerous as it is already.

What a corrupt, sleazy town this place is. Truly a citadel of lies.

"This budget takes specific steps to reduce the structural deficit by investing in technologies that will improve worker productivity, ... and identifying specific reductions in administrative overhead." Quote from Wheeler's budget message.

I wonder if the new chair ever talks to any of his mid to lower level employees. I happen to volunteer with a selection of them and they certainly haven't been impressed with the most recent round of technology improvements. Some manager (any ideas about saving money by removing those managers would be welcome) decided that county computers would be replaced by what they refer to as "thin client" devices. So you'd have a screen at your desk connected to a central brain -- but not a separate computer with a hard drive and cd player, etc. I haven't run into anybody who knows how much money they spent on this but it involved lots of very well paid IT staff and buying lots of new hardware (to be the brains of this system) and aggravating the county staff who were just trying to do work for the public. After months of that, it turned out that they had to pay an outside consultant to tell them it wasn't going to work. And now they're paying those same IT staff to put back the desktop computers and let regular staff get back to work. Did anybody even have their hand slapped for this big waste of time and money? Not so far as any lower level staff person knows...