Flash Report, the top conservative news aggregator in the state, has linked to just about every opinion piece I’ve written, so I wrote an exclusive for Jon Fleishman, the site’s politically powerful patriarch.  It ran today at the top of the site, in its #3 slot.

The subject is the growing trend of outsourcing by California cities that are struggling to deal with salaries that are too high and benefit/pension plans that are out of control.  As an afterthought, it just occurred to me that Jerry Brown’s Sacramento is not following the cities’ lead. Why not? Could it be because he, unlike electeds even in liberal strongholds like Marin County, remains a cowering coward in the face of public employee union bosses?

Maybe.  So, here’s the lead of the Flash Report piece:

In June of 2010, the tiny Los Angeles County city of Maywood admitted what many of us have known for some time – city employees are just too expensive.  Maywood’s admission came in the form of laying off every single one of its employees.

The city, a neighbor of the infamous city of Bell, had already outsourced its parks department, landscaping and street sweeping to private contractors and was happy with the results.  City officials said, in what CNN called “an odd twist,” that the outsourcing the rest would allow Maywood to provide its residents with better service for less. There’s nothing at all odd about that, unless one has a CNN-style belief system.

The New York Times later found the city council’s prediction that Maywood’s residents wouldn’t notice a difference in service to be true, writing, “The [expected] apocalypse never arrived.  In fact, it seems this city was so bad at being a city that outsourcing – so far, at least – is being viewed as an act of municipal genius.”

Cities don’t have to be bad to benefit from outsourcing, and many municipalities across the state are following Maywood’s lead.

To read the rest of the piece, click here.

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