Sam in the City: Chief Equity Officer is the New Hot Job Title
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Hi folks, welcome to another Sam in the City Broken Potholes special. This is the week of January 31st. We're going to be covering some issues quickly from around the country that may be affecting you in your local city. First off, here in the city of Phoenix, the Phoenix City Council will be voting this week to add June 10th as another paid holiday.

Folks, I think it's a great idea to celebrate the end of slavery, all for that. What I'm not for, and what I have a serious objection to, is adding yet another paid holiday for municipal workers. And this is going to be happening, if it already hasn't happened, all over the country, including in your city. So to give you an example, the city of Phoenix, you get New Year's Day, President's Day, Cesar Chavez Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving. That's two days, Christmas, New

Martin Luther King holiday, an extra half day on Christmas Eve, an extra half day on New Year's Eve. Add it all up, you're looking at 12 paid holidays already. This will be number 13. Can we do this like the lottery folks, like pick six?

I mean seriously, the problem here is really simple is that we are giving municipal workers advantages that nobody else in this country has when it comes to paid time off. If you add up these 13 paid holidays and add into that 8 to 15 hours per month at the City of Phoenix in accrued paid vacation time, and you get to the 15 hours pretty quickly, it only takes a couple of years, that is something like 12 to 22, 24 days of vacation time per year.

Just quite a bit. You can double that up, you can add to it, you can cash it out, about half of it. Additionally, you get 10 hours of sick leave, paid sick leave per month. So really, your city government, you're paying for 12 months. You're getting about 10. I mean, that's really what it comes down to, folks. You're paying for 12, you're getting 10. It's not a good deal for the taxpayers.

I would probably choose Juneteenth as one of my holidays. I think that is actually worth celebrating, but I think people should have a choice. Maybe it's eight or ten total holidays and you pick what you like. Frankly, it would not hurt to have government offices be open a little bit more. Great article this week in the City Journal. Highly encourage you to check them out. City-Journal.org if you're looking for the website. Talks about the wrong solutions to climate change.

This is a big issue, folks, because all these cities around the country are setting really aggressive goals like zero emissions by 2030 for your entire city. That's a really significant thing. And here's the trick to it. We don't have the power.

That's the issue. We don't have the energy to power this and a lot of these solutions, I highly encourage you actually to check out Michael Moore's latest documentary where he takes the solar and wind and generally what we consider the marine energy industry to task because in fact they're nothing of the sort when you add up all the carbon costs and the environmental damage that's involved in developing the solar panels

building them, putting them in place, the amount of space in open areas they have to take up. Same thing with wind. These are really inefficient technologies. There is an efficient technology, it's called nuclear. It has also zero emissions and when you add everything up, including the mining of all the minerals and resources needed, including the uranium, it is by far the cleanest energy source on the planet.

is also the safest. These cities are not doing that. They're spending huge amounts of money on very inefficient things and setting goals that are driving up your cost of government and your cost of energy, and doing so, frankly, in a very stupid way. So I encourage you to read that article by Andrew I. Fallot and Henry Miller. It is definitely worth your time. Next item, also from the City Journal, titled "Equity Warriors."

Folks, equity is a scam, it's a sham, it's a communist hustle. And I don't use the word communist very often, but that's exactly what it is. They flip the words on you, and a lot of folks didn't even notice when we moved from equality...

Which means equality of opportunity where government makes sure that we have a level playing field for everybody and what you achieve is based on what kind of effort you put into it. Instead we have equity which blames government and says systems must be adjusted for any disparity of outcomes. And that is communism. It's also totally non-functional throughout history in just about every country it's been tried in. In fact, every country it's been tried in. It is a disaster.

But that is what your government is doing now. The hot new job title of the year is Chief Equity Officer. You know what a Chief Equity Officer does? They make everything else the government does more expensive while driving people batty. And they don't actually achieve anything else. This is a jobs program for social justice warriors, for them to make a bundle of money on you without delivering any value. Your government should not do that.

I highly encourage you to read this. Some of the things that they are pushing, reparations keeps coming back around. They believe your city government should be handing out money to people of color. Actually, a lot of times they don't even go that route. That would be more equal than the route they suggest, which is primarily handing lots of money to allied groups. What will those allied groups do? Well, they will use it to influence the government to get more money.

That's how this works. They are giving millions to liberal causes all over this country through your government. If you wonder how progressive groups across the country get their funding, a lot of it comes from donors like George Soros, but a lot more is directed to them by your local government. I'll give you an example from here in the state of Arizona where we recently passed legalization of adult use recreational marijuana.

7% of the taxes collected from that are put into a fund they call the Justice, I mean I'm going to get this wrong probably, but I believe Justice Redistribution Fund. And those go to state health agencies and county health agencies and then they are handed down to Justice Orgs. What do those Justice Orgs do with it? They get more Democrats elected so that they can get more money from government.

LA is in the middle of a water crisis. Highly encourage you to check out this article at Bloomberg City Lab talking about efforts for Los Angeles to build water resiliency. City doesn't have a whole lot of water resources. It has existed mostly by stealing those resources from other parts of the country, including states like Arizona and Mexico, actually. They've stolen a lot of Mexican water.

Those dirty racists. But what they're doing right now is actually some good things in one sense. They're building improved reservoirs. They are engaging in rainwater capture, which is a very good idea, by the way. Your city should be looking to capture rainwater for the simple fact that it really does need to be treated before it goes anywhere running across city streets and all that kind of thing. It does pick up a lot of chemicals.

a lot of contamination, all that kind of thing. And so it's actually a good idea to be capturing and treating that water. And if you can, if you need it, and if you can turn it back into drinking water, that's even better. However, LA is not doing the most obvious thing that they should be doing. Desalination. You're by the ocean. You should be desalinating all the water you need and you should leave the inland sources for the people who live inland of you. This is actually a policy that the entire West Coast of the United States should adopt.

And hasn't for one really simple reason, and again this ties back to foolish, foolish policy by environmentalists in this country. They can't build the power sources, reliable power source, base loaded power to deliver the energy for the desalination they need to do.

And the best route to do that of course is nuclear, which environmentalists go all pansy-handed over. But at the end of the day, as we just said, it is the best, cleanest, most reliable source. However, since they won't do that, they aren't building that solution, and everything they're doing right now is a half-measure stopgap. It's time to get serious about this. If we're going to electrify every bloody car in America,

If we're going to continue to use far more water than we actually can reasonably extract from our rivers and underground sources, which we have to do, then we need nuclear. Get over it. Build it. The Biden administration has named a new homelessness czar.

I'm not big on czars in general, but having someone trying to address homelessness at the federal level, not a terrible idea. However, it is a terrible idea to pick a chief equity officer to do that job. Jeff Olivet, Biden's pick to head the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, is far more interested in increasing equity, which essentially just means increasing government spending without any positive results, while doing

while dividing your community and pushing actual racism, they are going to prioritize that over actually getting people off the streets, getting them healthy, getting them the mental health treatment, getting them the drug treatment, and getting them back into normal society. Apparently that doesn't rank very high on the list of Biden administration policies. Folks, once again, this is an example of pandering to the extreme left.

at the expense of our citizens. Homelessness is overrunning most of our major cities. It is destroying the quality of life for our citizens. It is hollowing out the economies of our cities. And yet, the left will do absolutely nothing about it because it's an industry. It's an industry that generates billions of dollars for their left-leaning organizations.

And as long as you leave the problem in place, you can leave the funding in place. God forbid they ever do anything to actually address this issue because then we would not need to pay all these people. Folks, that has been a Sam in the City Broken Potholes special for this week. Download the podcast. You can find us on Apple, Substack, Spotify, every other place you can find a podcast. Go to brokenpotholes.vote and get your news directly there.

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