Letter of the Day: Reform, not taxes

Reforms, not taxes

EDITOR: In recent editorials, The Press Democrat has supported pension reforms for public workers. Without structural reform, municipal, county and state budgets cannot be balanced without continuing reductions in funding for education and other services (e.g., maintaining roads). In Saturday's editorial ("A show of support for schools, kids"), you advocate support for raising taxes to avoid a funding crisis for local school districts. A better solution is to restructure union agreements as has recently been done in Wisconsin, Indiana, Idaho and Louisiana.

In Wisconsin, for example, school reforms have produced savings that have enabled school districts to hire teachers, reduce class sizes and fund new programs, all without raising taxes. Recent elections in San Jose and San Diego show that the public strongly supports the restructuring of public employee union entitlements to preserve services and get on the road to fiscal responsibility.

Your readers deserve to know that structural reforms are a better long-term solution to our educational funding problems than raising taxes.

BOB MELLBERG

Santa Rosa