FeedsGovernment salaries are still too high
I don’t want to get off on a rant here, but I sometimes find it hard to sympathize with government employees.
These are people I talk to often throughout the course of my daily job and I tend to rely on them to do it effectively, too. Here in Wayne I often see them around town in those rare moments when I’m not actually on the clock, as well, and I generally like most of them—they’re good people.
Still, when it gets around to budget time I get frustrated enough to start breaking pens because the municipal marketplace seems to be the only one not making big enough adjustments to keep down costs.
You’ll see the occasional acknowledgement here and there—the Canton Township Board of Trustees mulling a decrease in salary for elected officials, department heads or school administrators taking a temporary pay freeze—but you know they’ll eventually make up those ‘lost’ funds, too. In the meantime, everyone talks bravely about how they’re doing more with less.
Well, if that’s what amounts to bravery in the workforce, we all need the proverbial red badge of courage. I’d like to talk about a field where people are not doing more for less, but I can’t name one. I’ll tell you one thing, though: it sure isn’t journalism.
It doesn’t matter where you live or what your government is like, though, chances are you will find some outdated practice that contributes to the dire budget situation your city or township is facing.
One of my big pet peeves here in Wayne is the concept of longevity pay. It’s something that employees are eligible for after three years of service; a bonus you find in government but hardly anywhere else.
This year, according to the budget proposed, the city will pay out more than $215,000 in longevity bonuses—at a time when the police department is operating at staff levels lower than 2006, when the administration is considering laying off a full-time person in the Youth Services Department, moving the office to the Rec center and selling the building on Wayne Road and taking $4.6 million from the Downtown Development Authority (DDA) to balance the budget. Even so, the proposed budget calls for taking more than $260,000 from the fund balance, leaving only about $378,000.
I know this is a contract issue. You can’t do much about it now. In the future, though, this is something that has to go. It amounts to rewarding someone for not getting fired. They have a bonus like that elsewhere: it’s called ‘You don’t have to look for a new job.’
In this day and age in Michigan, that’s quite a benefit.
Granted, this will not solve all of the budgetary problems here in Wayne. It will cycle up and down, too, as new employees are hired and old ones retire.
The thing is, though, that it will never be zero.
City officials might argue that it’s important to keep employees around for the long term, but that’s not necessarily true. You just want to keep good employees.
If municipalities want to hand out bonuses, they should be based on merit and nothing else. It’ll save funds every year, and it’ll be easier to justify to the homeowners still fortunate enough to be able to pay their taxes.
