We'd like to direct our readers' attention this morning, to a couple of interesting items appearing in today's Standard-Examiner. In a broad but slightly roundabout way, the messages on these two pages each contain one common element: an emphasis on the necessity of increased financial prudence and frugality in our city's extremely trying current economic environment.
The first item, a Scott Schweke story, reports that as our city struggles with its financially embarrassing current revenue pinch, the administration is cutting nonessential expenses to the bone, and will be doing without services even so mundane as newspaper subscriptions and window washing:
• Ogden to forgo clean windows, newspapersWhile we're not happy to see our friends at the Standard-Examiner suffer a $2,800 per year revenue hit, we're delighted to discover that the big spending Boss Godfrey is suddenly examining all the options, in his new quest to stop the financial bleeding at the Emerald City treasury.
The second item, a Gary N. Hicken letter to the Std-Ex editor, is slightly more tangential, in that its main theme addresses what the writer deems to be Boss Godfrey's misplaced priorities. Nevertheless, there is a reader comment under this letter which does squarely address another money saving strategy which we believe Mr. Godfrey ought to carefully consider, as he adopts, however belatedly, a more tight-fisted municipal money management approach. Read Mr. Hicken's letter here:
• Mayor lacks the people's best interestsWe also incorporate here the text of the reader comment mentioned above:
By: Blue Sky @ 07/15/2009, 11:58 AMHaving carefully pondered this reader comment, and being the curious type, we wandered over to this fantastic Salt Lake Tribune-sponsored site, and navigated to the page where Ogden City salaries are displayed in descending order. Once there, we invested about ten minutes, performed some head counts and calculations, and were both amused and slightly shocked to discover that the 31 Community & Economic Development Department employees displayed on this list impose an annual salary burden upon Ogden City of $2,026,378... an amount within amazing "spitting distance" of the $2.2 million tax revenue shortfall with which the administration is now trying to cope.
If Godfrey wants to save money, he can fire his Economic Development Team who have done nothing for Ogden but get us into this predicament.
Coincidence?
Hmmmm.... Perhaps Standard-Examiner reader Blue Sky is actually onto something here.
And what say our gentle readers about all this? Who knows? Perhaps one of our gentle readers will want to calculate the salary overhead of Boss Godfrey's "indispensable" A Team.
