Bigger Salary, Fancy New Offices, More Staff

The staff at Ulster Politics are speechless. Absolutely speechless. For the most part, we at Ulster Politics, and just about everyone that we know, find the Daily Freeman to be pretty much useless. However the editorial in the Freeman today has us wondering if aliens have taken away the normal spineless writers at the Freeman and replaced them with highly talented investigative reporters.

There is no one that writes for Ulster Politics who could have written a better editorial on the bond request for fancy new office space for the newly elected Democratic Executive and Comptroller than the Freeman did today.

Now.... if they only took Hein's real estate deals as serious as they do his need for a new crib. Oh... and while we are on the topic of "what's in it for Mike" how about an editorial on the raise that Mike Hein already gave himself over and above the recommendation by the charter... and the additional Deputy Executive and the 2 additional Assistant Deputy Executives and the $88,500 planner position rumored to be created for March Gallagher. We know, we know... it was the Legislature that did this... not Mikey.... but we don't hear Mike protesting.

At a time when people are suffering and doing without, this insatiable greed for a bigger salary, more staff and fancy office is disgusting.


From Wednesday, December 17th Daily Freeman Editorial:

Ulster County legislators are appropriately gun-shy about borrowing $608,733 to outfit offices for the county’s new county executive and comptroller and staffs.Given the opportunity last week, legislators wisely declined the honor, sending the measure back to committee with instructions to cut the request in half.But, to be honest, at some $300,000, even halving the original proposal sounds pretty quick with a buck in these very difficult times. They should think again about that.Obviously, the newly created offices under the county charter form of government that takes effect on Jan. 1 will need to be properly outfitted to fulfill their legal obligations.

But there is outfitted and, then, there is outfitted.

County Executive-elect Mike Hein should show some leadership during this transition by simply pronouncing publicly that he and Comptroller-elect Elliott Auerbach will have to make do with whatever improvisation is necessary to get their jobs done. This would mean a commitment to a creative and dogged use of existing space and equipment for the time being and the foreseeable future, until such time as the economy has turned.In the end, the productivity of these offices primarily will depend on the organizational and intellectual capital of the officers who inhabit them, not the physical plant in which they work.

It is a time, properly, of diminished expectations because there is so much less to go around. Government is not immune from this, even at its highest reaches. And there is some virtue in the idea that the new county officers should face every day when they arrive at work a physical manifestation of the same crisis everyone else faces these days.

Most of all, the two new officers need to lead by example.