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SteveD - solution, reform retired employee benefit programs. Real reforms that cut cost today, not the Avedisian pension reforms that didn't cut one penny in the over $900 million in liabilities.

Those numbers above prove that even with tens of millions of new tax dollars flowing into the city budget over the last ten years, it is not enough to pay for these benefits. The cost of the benefits are not sustainable even with city deparment budget dollars and school dollars being siphoned off to help pay these expenses.

The amount of new tax dollars required to pay for these beenfits is going to continue increase every year. That means less and less will go to the Police, fire and DPW and schools. Reallocating saved dollars back into those department is the answer.

Unless the Warwick economy can produced millions of dollars in new tax revenue (which I doubt it can), more and more programs and services will be cut. At some point all the deparments are going to find it difficult to function like this.

BTW Steve those lines are not cut and pasted. I have been collecting city budget for ten years and this is my analysis. One would think that the mayor and the city council would want to do the same thing to look at the trends developing in the city. Why do that, they might discover the city has a problem? Denying there is a problem is a much easier path to take.

From: Avedisian lists pluses of ’13, cites ’14 challenges

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