On New Year's Eve we received another lovely note from the city threatening to cut city services once again.
The card announced an upcoming meeting on Jan. 11 to discuss funding issues like reducing library hours, eliminating senior services, contracting with the county sheriff's department for law enforcement, and the ever popular solution of our senior staff: raising taxes.
Missing from this threat notice, of course, was the one solution our city staff will not consider, which is cuts to the compensation and wages we pay them, namely senior staff, department heads, fire and police.
A very simple solution to our budget issues is a scaled wage reduction for the 80 plus city employees earning over $100,000 a year. If we reduce compensation of our senior staff, department heads, fire and police by a percentage point for every $10,000 earned, we will save over $1.5 million a year and that doesn't include similar reductions in benefits which would bring the total savings closer to $2 million a year.
City staff are obviously trying to control the budget issue as evident by the big yellow threat notice and our elected officials seem powerless or uninterested in the solution that must take place for our city to remain solvent.
A scaled reduction in compensation of 1 percent for every $10,000 earned shares the pain of the evenly for all our employees. It must happen, there is no other way forward that is fair.
— Todd McCune Bray
