The Housal ATM

Cuts are coming to our Elk Grove School District...but everyone with their eyes open could have seen this coming a thousand miles down the road.

But no, all our Elk Grovian eyes were wide shut, and now we get the heart wrenching news that programs will be cut. Counselors will be laid off. Boys water polo and girls soccer programs will be curtailed. Horrors! Perhaps this could have been ameliorated if we didn't have a city so wholly dependent on the performance of residential real estate.

Yes! When housal units were rising in value at 20% per annum ad infinitium, we built more schools, hired more teachers, offered more programs, but not once did we plan for the remote contingency that this hallucinated money machine of ours would stop working. Now that it has stopped working, and now that we've delayed any real action for a good 30 months, the cuts are coming.

Here we go -- the very first thing irate Elk Grovian parents do is bitch about how much our EGUSD administrators are making. We've got a forty million dollar hole and all eyes are on how a couple extra thousand are going to "fatten the pockets" of the school leadership. This is misguided. For one thing, they are well paying jobs in Elk Grove, some of the very few we do have, and their marginal tax rates are about the only thing keeping this whole racket working. What's not to like about the taxes they pay to keep the schools running?

Instead of uber-expensive administrators, these parents say, how about axing some of their income to keep counselors counseling? This is the same as this "wall street vs. main street" saga but played out on a smaller level. Anyone making more money must somehow be culpable, be the cause of all these problems.

Our city was built on a scheme predicated on perpetual suburban growth and the economic bliss of its residents drunk on cheap credit and their liberal use of their housal ATM machines. Perhaps had we not allowed the 5,500 unit starts per year, starts that starters couldn't afford in the first place, we wouldn't have nearly as many foreclosures, we wouldn't have nearly the property value declines and we wouldn't have nearly the same level of cuts necessary to our schools.

But we do. We think fat school administrators are the problem, that if we somehow cut their salaries all this will go away. I wonder what school system we graduated from. Maybe the same system that told me it was OK to end my sentences with a preposition...