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On Fri, Jul 20, 2018 at 7:37 PM, Kenneth L. Dulaney , wrote: <br />Hi .. <br />First of all, thank you for all the good work you are doing to make Redwood City more vibrant and livable. It <br />is a more pleasant place to live than when we moved here in 1989. <br />Linda and I wanted to respond to the brochure we received today regarding the City's precarious financial <br />position and solutions to resolve it. We wanted to respond by email since we know that he upcoming council <br />meeting will be overcrowded. <br />I realize that many of the problems may be due to previous administration actions before you were members of <br />the Council when those members thought little about he long term consequences of their actions. However, we <br />are against raising the sales tax. Governments continue to fall into financially difficult states and find taxes as <br />the only answer. At some point, you just have to say no. <br />Here are suggestions that we would like you to consider: <br />1. There should not be services for those who are not here legally. Instead push that to the State or County. <br />We must pay attention to our poor first. We are not against immigrants, but we realize that those are <br />optional services, not a necessity. <br />2. We must consider reforming the pension plan for public safety workers who retire at an early age and <br />for City workers. We should raise the retirement ages and gradually convert these pension plans to <br />401K plans that the end user can manage themselves. We must keep our police at the same level or <br />higher, but we also do not need to make them independently wealthy when many of us live to 80 or 90 <br />years of age. You should gather the workers and tell them that something must be done, or their <br />pensions will not survive them; they have to be part of the solution, not just say that they are entitled to <br />money that is no longer there. <br />3. While I am happy the City has increased housing, but the City increasingly has a voter base that is <br />transient and does not have the long-term interest of the City in mind like Linda and I do. To this point, <br />I think there should be a head tax on a rental unit. <br />