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Apollo and Warwick_Resident1998, it's pretty clear that these noisy critics don't have legitimate points to make.

Both of you made valid points and pointed to information that objective financial experts have provided to the city, and drawn logical conclusions from that information.

The city is in decent financial shape. None of the future liabilities are due today, nor are they urgent enough to justify unilaterally cutting existing pension benefits or any of the other doomsday scenarios that the noisy critics want.

Like WR98, I think the council and city unions can negotiate future contracts that lower the burden on city taxpayers -- but their success hinges on dealing honestly with each other.

That means the city council needs to drop this "strategy" (if you can call it that) of crying poverty and portraying the unions as lazy and greedy in the midst of the city's fiscal troubles.

The idea of the city being on the verge of collapse has already been proven wrong, for one thing. That certainly will not help the council's position when it's time to negotiate new contracts.

And as far as the costs we're paying now for contracts negotiated in the past, we can not forget that Solomon, Merolla, and Ladouceur are among the people who actually approved those contracts and the budgets that funded them.

As long as they keep trying to distract from that truth, city officials shouldn't expect to be taken seriously when they go looking for union concessions.