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The Sacking Continues
By Edward H. LeHoskey, Torrington
Local — Have we done it again? When the time comes to get rid of our newly appointed principal, Mr. John Hudson, how much will it cost the taxpayers? We, the shareholders in this corporation known as Torrington, are in the dark as usual; the terms of this latest contract are not known. We have not had much luck in our efforts to go out of town for talent of any kind. They say that after we hired Police Chief Sabo the folks in New Britain declared a holiday; this was after they provided glowing references for their former chief. The folks in West Hartford evidently provided the same for Mr. Hudson.
Why must we always go out of town for talent? Is there no one in the system who can handle these positions? If that's the case, we are really in bad shape. The Board of Safety has evidently come a long way in just a few years. Chief Janelle, Chief Field and their deputies, I am sure, are highly qualified and they have come up through the ranks.
When you want or need people to lead a department, look at what you have—people who have been doing their jobs. We don’t need to go looking for experts all over creation, only to end up with problems. Board members, in their search for experts, should always bear in mind that experts designed the Titanic.
I must wish the new principal well in his endeavors. His search for the factors that keep teachers from devoting 100% of their time to teaching may prove to be elusive. Teachers do not work 100% of the time, and then we have the leader of the teachers' union advising them not to extend themselves.
The Board of Education has, over the years, created quite a base of voters. I remember attending the old East School wherein we had a teacher in every classroom, a principal and a janitor. Once every two weeks we had a music teacher for a half day and an art teacher for a half day. I recently looked at a Vogel-Wetmore class book, and it appears there is now an employee for every eight students. Is there any wonder we can't afford the school system? Incumbents are well entrenched and we, Torrington's taxpayers, must vote them out. The time has come for the renegotiation of union contracts. It is payback time. City fathers must come in with budgets that are lower than the ones now in force.
State — Marc S. Ryan, Governor Rowland's Budget chief, advocates borrowing to meet budget shortfalls—more debt. If they don't bite the bullet now we will never get out of our larger and deeper hole.
We have never seen any figures on auto emissions testing. It is felt that the state has paid Envirotest Systems about $23 million a year to test approximately 1.5 million cars. Does the $20 charge for testing go to the state? Who maintains the buildings, etc? No one seems to know. The state is now negotiating with another firm, Agbar of Chicago. Why do we not have any inkling of what goes on here? Sounds like another Connecticut Resources Recovery Authority deal. We all know about them and how the taxpayers' monies have been thrown around.
Now comes news of another quasi-public agency— Connecticut Innovations, Inc. This outfit was formed in 1989 by the legislature and funded with taxpayers' monies from the sale of bonds. This agency in 1996 had 24 employees and a $979,000 payroll and paid no bonuses. In Dec. 2001, this same agency had 41 employees and a payroll of $2.76 million. One employee had a salary of $131,000 and a bonus of $82,000—plus $14,000 in interest from an employee share account. Another employee had a salary of $127,000—and a bonus and interest of $71,000. A part-timer earned $68,000 yearly and received $60,000 in bonuses. With all these "quasi" outfits (and we probably don't know about all of them), we, the taxpayers, are being quasied to death.
CRRA gave out $226,000 in bonuses last year alone. The sacking of Connecticut continues. Governor Rowland called the bonuses "absolutely outrageous." Is that all he could say? I guess he thought the base salaries were OK. The sacking continues. News commentators around the state have called the last regular session of the legislature a failure because they failed to agree on a budget. They also failed to address the $220 million lost by the CRRA. They failed to do anything about all the party faithful engaged in the sacking of our state. The revenues they had coming from all the taxes and fees have slowed down and now we are showing big deficits.
What to do? Not being rocket scientists, they have never thought of spending less or cutting expenses. I seem to remember that they did increase teacher retirement benefits. Of course, that is a large group—and don't forget that each favor a politician provides for an individual has been shown to buy 3.7 votes.
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