Wednesday, December 2, 2009

City told to gird for more budget cuts -- baltimoresun.com

City told to gird for more budget cuts -- baltimoresun.com: "Baltimore must carve $130 million from its already stripped-down spending plan to account for plummeting revenue and mushrooming pension costs next year, according to projections released Tuesday afternoon.

The grim figures indicate the city, still reeling from sweeping cuts earlier this year, must dig even deeper to balance next year's budget."

Baltimore City faces a big budget problem. Many businesses have shut down. People have been moving away for years. The declining housing market has made things much worse. The proposed response from some in city government - let's tax non-profits. No one in City Hall has seriously proposed ending the war on drugs as an appropriate first step. I often spent hours as a prosecutor sitting around in court dealing with petty drug offenses. I got paid well to do work that I considered to be fairly worthless. We would often plea out drug cases for time served, often without probation. Many times distribution cases would be knocked down and charged as 'attempted distribution' so they would be treated as misdemeanors. Officers often got paid overtime to make these arrests and got overtime again to show up to court. It was the biggest waste of time, energy, and money that I have ever seen.

6 comments:

  1. This is very interesting Bill. I am a huge fan of The Wire and so I'm always interested in stories about Baltimore City, especially those related to the criminal justice system. Thanks again for helping out with the blog.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yeah this made me instantly think of The Wire too David, for obvious reasons. Anyway, it's interesting to hear a weary prosecutor's perspective on this farce.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey LEAP Blog folks, this is just a suggestion, but I think it might be helpful if recent blog comments were listed along the right-hand sidebar. I know of other blogs that include this feature, and it makes it a bit easier to participate in popular discussions without needing to check the comment activity on each individual post. Anyway, like I said, just a suggestion.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Great idea Rhayader... I've added the Recent Comments box on the right hand side. Let me know how it looks on your end.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Hmm... the comments don't seem to be showing up in the recent comments box... I wonder if it takes a while to start working. Maybe it only checks for recent comments once an hour or something like that?

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hey thanks for implementing the recent comments box David, it looks great!

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...