Re: your Nov. 5 editorial, "The verdicts are in":
Oh, oh, we're in trouble, folks. Whenever The Star goes along with the misleading language of the politicians, often in the past and most recently in this editorial, we learn again that we don't know whom to trust. This silliness and the consistent half-truths about how many jobs the city has cut in order to save us taxpayers money are pure baloney. The trouble is, The Star reports it the way they say it.
Example: The City Council "has eliminated 42 positions."
This is probably true enough at the bottom line, but we shouldn't forget the real fact that many, many of these positions, although unfilled -- and we should wonder how the city has continued to run if these positions were ever really that important -- have resulted in what many of us consider overly generous pensions.
Along with The Star, we must learn that it all comes from the same pocket, and the folks who run our city might consider being more sincere as we move forward. With the failure of the recent tax measure, they are really going to have to try to honestly cut back. And if Mike Tracy, who somehow managed to win a seat on the council, is really going to donate his city salary to what we assume will be some local police charity, we must remember that it is a drop in the bucket to what we are paying him each year through his massive pension as a retired police chief.
Let's start off by asking The Star to list the "42 positions" and how much we are all paying in pensions, if not in salary and, finally, how many city workers were actually dumped out on the street in order to save money, as some of our friends and neighbors have been dumped in this time of troubled economics.
-- Ross R. Olney, Ventura