Nanaimo-Info-blog: Can Taxpayers Afford The Cost Of The Civil Service?
Can Taxpayers Afford The Cost Of The Civil Service?
Municipalities Should Not Enter A ‘Bidding War’ For Staff
Over the past few decades while we were all enjoying the benefits of living in a financial la-la land few of us were paying attention to some of the sweetheart deals being struck between complacent politicians and the public sector unions who have succeeded in arranging wage and benefit packages that now are looking absolutely crippling and unsustainable.
Justifying outlandish wage and benefit settlements over the years based on the fact that some other community was paying their employees a certain amount, brings to mind the oft posed question of whether you too would jump off the cliff because everyone else is doing it. The lemming running along in the middle or back of the pack maybe employing the same logic our civic ‘leaders’ have been using these past years. Just because Kelowna is paying their employees another X% is not a very good reason to follow suit.
Ron Lambert, the city Fire Chief is quoted in the Nanaimo Bulletin as saying that the pay in Nanaimo is ‘pretty modest’ when compared with other communities. I wonder how many Nanaimo households earning $50,000 really think their local firemen earning in excess of $100,000 are really being paid modestly?
If you want to see the end of this nonsense of municipalities engaging in bidding wars for personnel just take a look south of the border to see how well that has worked out for them. If Nanaimo tapayers were paying the estimated 15% tax increase needed to pay for water sewer and roads and then asked to fork out another 5 – 10% to keep the prima donna’s happy in the public sector, how long do you think it would be before people started to wake up to what our elected officials have been doing with our money over the past few decades?
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