The Herald
---- —
Area municipalities and schools are struggling financially as the tax base drops. It’s a time to tighten the belts and cut the fat, right?
Guess not.
We continue to see the same old abuse of taxpayer money as school board directors and municipal elected officials feel they deserve to take junkets to conventions and conferences.
In the year 2010, for any elected official to expect these glorified vacations to be funded by taxpayers is outrageous. Still, it continues to happen.
The latest disgrace to meet the ears and eyes of the taxpayers came Monday night in Farrell. City Manager LaVon Saternow announced that the city — which already is viewed as a distressed community under the state’s Act 47 — was in dire straits.
She said that by the end of the fiscal year, the city could be seeing a $280,000 deficit. Lower wage taxes due to high unemployment for city residents as well as other factors during the current recession are decimating the city’s coffers.
A possible discussion with Sharon about consolidation was recommended as a way to save funds for both communities. Now that’s fiscal responsibility.
Yet, what else do we read in The Herald story? Council person Stephanie Sheffield actually had the gall to ask that the taxpayers pay for her to attend the National Black Caucus of Local Elected Officials conference in Memphis, Tenn.
How could any elected official possibly think it’s OK to spend thousands of dollars during a recession to pay for a junket to a convention?
But it gets worse. Two other Farrell council members — Kimberly Doss and Rudy Hammond — actually voted to approve the trip. Luckily, the other three council members employed some common sense and voted against it. Since it was a tie vote — Stephen Bennefield was absent — the trip was nixed.
Congratulations to Mayor Olive McKeithan, Bob Burich and Gene Pacsi for doing the right thing for the taxpayers.
We bring this issue to light in Farrell simply because it’s in the immediate news. But this same disgrace happens almost everywhere. For some reason school and municipal board members think it is part of their “pay” to attend these frivolous conferences. Guess what — it’s not.
Can anybody really name anything important that a conference attendee brought back to actually help the taxpayers? On many of these conference excursions, the attendees don’t even go to the sessions. To them it is simply a free vacation on the backs of the taxpayers.
It has to stop.
Most private businesses have quit paying for employees to attend these kinds of conventions, and public bodies need to follow suit.
Boards are elected to do what’s best for the taxpayers, and attending conventions in this horrendous economy isn’t how to do it. If they think that it is, then taxpayers should remove them from office when their terms expire.
