Charleston Voice: Five Florida cities that may be future Detroits

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Five Florida cities that may be future Detroits

Five Florida formulas for fiscal train wrecks

July 24, 2013

by Dr. Richard Swier

WDW- FL reported that one-third of Florida’s cities are in “perilous financial positions“. The reasons: the increasing burden of growing retirement and medical costs for government retirees coupled with shrinking revenues.

Luke Rosiak from the Washington Examiner did an analysis to determine which US cities have a larger proportion of government workers to population than Detroit. Rosiak used the Census Bureau’s 2011 Annual Survey of Public Employment and Payroll to rank every U.S. city with a population of 200,000 or more.

Rosiak notes, “Remarkably, the Census Bureau excluded from these figures all teachers and education professionals, which make up the largest group of local government employees.”

Rosiak reports, “Detroit declared bankruptcy due in no small part to $3 billion in unfunded public employee pensions owed a sprawling city workforce that kept growing even as the city’s population shriveled, but a Washington Examiner analysis found that 19 major American cities have even bigger ratios of such workers to residents.”

“What’s more, seven of the 19 cities with larger relative workforces than Detroit paid workers more than twice as much as the Motor City did its employees,” states Rosiak.

To view the map with all of the city data click here.

Below are those Florida cities listed by Rosiak (Note: some city government agencies and public school teachers/education professionals are not counted):

TAMPA