We'll direct our readers' attention this morning to a couple of items of interest, each of which relates to our upcoming September 11 municipal primary election:
Sharp-eyed reader Curmudgeon this morning spotted an interesting article in today's Salt Lake Tribune, which pertains to a problem that has been a pet peeve of Weber County Forum since the very early days of this blog. We duly incorporate for our readers' attention gentle Curmudgeon's text, cut and pasted from a lower article comments section:
The Salt Lake Trib is running a story this morning about a proposed overhaul of the justice court system to make the judges full time state employees, paid by the state as other state judges are, and subject to voter reconfirmation after each six year term. The matter of justice courts being cash cows for local government, and of the judges' pay coming out of the fines they assess has come up here before.Indeed, the establishment of our very own Emerald City Justice Court has drawn plenty of "electronic ink" on these pages over the past two years. For us, the opening of a Justice Court in our city, in conjunction with Boss Godfrey's aggressive and still operational ticket quota system, is just another example -- in a long line of examples -- of the current administration's harsh and citizen-unfriendly style of municipal governance.
Our regular readers will recall, of course, that it was the issue of ticket quotas which also led in the year 2006 to one of the most embarrassing incidents in recent Emerald City history -- the now notorious "Vangate scandal."
Although we know that the lumpencitizenry of our little Utah town have long memories, we nevertheless see no harm in refreshing our readers' recollections as to these events.
And speaking of jogging our readers' memories, this morning's Standard-Examiner features an excellent guest commentary, by Emerald City resident Kathy Gambles, on the topic of "what we've all learned" during eight years of Boss Godfrey tyranny.
These lessons have been learned "the hard way" by our resourceful Emerald City community of course.
We'll also add our sincere hope that we of Emerald City have learned one other thing which Ms. Gambles doesn't mention -- the location of our neighborhood primary election polling places.
You know what to do, WCF readers. Do it at your neighborhood polling place on September 11, 2007.
Have at it, O gentle ones.
