Living Wage Cost & Benefit Unknown

Here we go again! The democratic controlled City Council is going off half-cocked into another touchy feely social program that even they admittedly have no idea what effect, if any, it will have or how much it will cost. The Bloomington Living Wage Coalition invited Mark Brenner a professor from University of Massachusetts to speak; he has published studies on the effect of the living wage ordinances in various communities. Brenner reported the effect was mostly positive in the 130 larger cities that have living wage ordinances. The closest comparison to a small rural college town like Bloomington was Boston, in which Brenner pointed out the full degree to which numbers could be applied to Bloomington, was difficult to determine. He also reported that the financial impact to cities was fairly minimal, about $150,000 for Pasadena, California in its first year under the living wage ordinance. Milton Fisk, the local author of the proposal also has admitted that his organization has no idea how much this program will end up costing the City however, their best estimate is somewhere between $150,000 and $200,000 the first year. When the question came up about the projected cost to the city, Andy Ruff was quoted as saying “Dollar for dollar, there was no comparison between money in the city budget to that in the pocket of low wage workers”, or in other words, I have no idea and I really don’t care. With all of the financial ills that face our city, why do our elected officials continue to come up with proposals that simply add to the problem? Furthermore, in a city that has to apply for an excess levy to get enough money to give it’s employees a minimal cost of living increase isn’t it rather ironic that its Council would come up with yet another proposal to siphon off some of these much-needed funds.

With the absence of a sustained cost versus benefit study on small cities such as Bloomington, it is careless and irresponsible for elected officials to commit the taxpayers of our community the status of guinea pigs for their own ego feeding desire for press and notoriety. Of course another possible motive behind this proposal is that the Democrats are simply championing another taxpayer-funded employment benefit program for their voter base. What makes them think social ills are so easily solved by programs like this one and if they were, wouldn’t there be a lot more cities adopting the living wage ordinance? Social programs like this rarely provide the desired effect and when they don’t, they are usually expanded to encompass a larger group or area to bolster results. What makes people think this ordinance won’t be expanded to include all of Bloomington, what about all of Monroe County? In a college city such as ours that depends on a lot of part-time student workers, isn’t it possible that such an ordinance could have a profound effect on their ability to find employment. Since the living wage proposal includes a benefit provision for part-time employees, isn’t it possible that higher skilled individuals seeking part-time or second job employment with benefits could actually displace lower skilled employees? Unfortunately this ordinance proposal has more questions than it has answers and furthermore, now is not the time to risk hundreds of thousands of tax dollars on an unproven social program.