BOE and M&C frustration

I received this email last week from a resident who has had it up to here with the political nonsense and waste of everyone’s time. Sorry I am only posting it today, but I was taking a much needed hiatus.  I think we all share her sense of frustration and I am glad that she spoke out.

thanks for the letter, Joann.

May 6, 2010 04:52:53 PM,

Dear Board of Ed / Council Members;

As a tax payer and resident of New Milford I would like to express the frustration I felt when I attended last night’s public meeting regarding our school budget.  To me the only difference between the meeting last night and the one held on Thursday, April 29^th was the number of people present.  I am completely appalled that there was not more substance and specific and current information brought to the table.  The performance last night showed nothing but disrespect for the people of New Milford.  You should be burning the midnight oils to try to come up with a solution - we certainly did not get that impression.

In my professional life I am also responsible for a budget and we are also going through staffing changes and budget cuts, line item by line item.  The expectation of my management is that when I come to the table that I present CLEARLY each solution and case scenario and to justify every dollar.  To that point I do not see how we can expect the Council to approve and push through the budget as is, or for the people of New Milford to accept it, unless the Board of Ed clearly outlines each area and how they propose to create efficiencies that will justify the spending today and for the future. 

How can any of us expect the Association to vote and even discuss concessions when they do not know what they are conceding to?  I understand that the salary and benefits bucket is the largest figure.  However, it is not the only figure.  Last week you did discuss holding off on capital improvements.  What other areas can be run more efficiently, still providing outstanding service and save some money?  I once had a Regional Manager who enforced a cut back based on employees being allowed to only use milk for coffee/tea.  Employees were banned from using company milk for their breakfast cereal.  This may seem petty but the savings realized based on one cup of milk per day for 500 employees was huge.

The only way to justify or deny something is to review it in black and white.  What I heard last night was another conversation with people focusing on and circling around the issue of the Director of Curriculum position and the pay freeze/benefits adjustment, or not as the case may be, by the Association – that was it. 

What I would like to see and what I believe the employer, aka the tax payers of New Milford, deserve is an updated PowerPoint presentation or a similar format, highlighting any new situations such as recent retirements, justifying your spend and presenting some creative solutions and different scenarios that you may be considering to create efficiencies but maintain the high level of education (academics and the extracurricular actives) that our children deserve.    

I am sure like any organization you have some administrative fat that can be trimmed.  For example, the last list of salaries I saw had a Data Processing position listed at a salary of $108, 883.  If this information is correct, I would like to know exactly what a Data Processing person does to justify this salary.  In my world that salary would be about 45-50% of $108K and I work in NYC.  These people are working in New Milford not in NYC.  I am curious and would like to know what kind of reimbursement expenses within the administration you plan to reallocate into actual items that benefit our children.  How many admin/secretarial positions are currently in place and can these positions be shared?  What other positions can be shared so that we can continue to provide the education and resources that our children deserve.  What exactly is in place to justify the salaries that people receive – do you have a performance review process in place?  Do you have people on staff that have outdated skills but receive high salaries?  Can you reorganize these positions and offer them at a different salary grade and insist that the skills need to match current needs of our community and our world.  People need to work faster and more efficiently. Why do we have a Superintendents Secretary, Secretary to Director or Curriculum & Instruction; Business Admin Assistant and an Assistant Business Administrator.  I know you cannot tell us who received pink slips but surely you can communicate that your are saving X amount of dollars in district administration salaries; X amount in teaching salaries etc.  Put in on paper so that we can review it and understand what is going on.  There needs to me some clear information so that people can understand what steps are being taken. I believe that since you are spending our money we need to know exactly how much is being spent right down to every paperclip and sheet of paper.  The tax payers need to know if it is possible that you can renegotiate rates with your suppliers and vendors or is this done on a state level?  If you have direct responsibility for this what steps have you taken?  If it is done on a state level then we need to organize a citizens petition to demand that the state renegotiate since they have removed our funding.  We need to know how they are spending our hard earned tax dollars. 

Are there any other areas where we can join together to try to create revenue – the Autism program is one, having a Grants writer is another.  Is there anything else we can do as a community to come together and come up with a solution and more revenue that is not tax based? 

The people of New Milford deserve to know EXACTLY IN BLACK AND WHITE how their tax dollars are being spent.  If you choose not to come to the next meeting with a factual presentation then you are showing nothing but disrespect to us.  To save the expense of making handouts make your presentation available electronically on your website so that people can print out their own copy and bring it to the meeting.  Surely that would save a few dollars.  I’m sure that each person could print one extra copy for their neighbor who may not have access to the Internet or a computer.

  Sincerely,

   A Frustrated New Milford Resident

You Sunk my Battleship!

Fiscal Imbalances for the layfolk and how voting no for the budget was a stupid, stupid choice 

The issues affecting our state’s financial affairs are but one in a chain link of events that were set in motion round about August of 2007.  This is all very complicated for most lay people but, in effect, the subprime mortgage market became overextended due to excessive demand for residential real estate loans.  Basically, mortgage servicers couldn’t produce loans fast enough to package and sell them to Wall Street investment banks who would then pool those loans up and repackage them as (relatively complicated) bonds to be sold to pension plans, insurance companies, banks, etc.  In order to crank out all those loans, lending standards were significantly lowered to a point that borrowers were receiving financing without even a remote chance of ever being able to pay the loan.  That game worked well enough as long as real estate prices continued to move higher.  As more borrowers began to default, the subprime bubble burst.  The quality of the loan pools that Wall Street was creating declined and the pension funds, insurance companies, banks, etc. started selling.  With no more market for those loans, there was no more subprime market, which eliminated a big swath of potential home buyers.  As the number of home buyers declined, inventory overwhelmed demand and real estate prices plummeted.  That started the slide that broke down the rest of the mortgage market and then, gradually, the rest of the bond market, the stock market, etc.  This story sounds like a problem that originated with risky mortgages that somehow spread like a contagion and it’s easy to blame the mortgage market and the high profile (and ridiculously highly paid) investment bankers at the epicenter of this crisis.  The reality, however, is that overextending and excessive leverage was a problem that was system wide: governments, states, banks and consumers had all collectively borrowed far too much money on the premise that income and asset values would continue to go up into the future.  The subprime mortgage market was simply the first thing to blow.  If we replayed the past few decades, it could have easily have been something else that went first.

The State of New Jersey, in that regard, was not unlike any other player in this game.  To be fair, all the parties involved (consumers, banks, government) were all equally stupid.  Politicians are an exceptionally easy target so I’ll pick on them for a minute.  In effect, all politicians are likely to take the path of least resistance to satisfy voters.  What does that mean?  Voters want better schools and better public services and pay less in taxes. I know that sounds like an odd statement since NJ’s taxes have gone up every year, but one needs to remember that this is an extremely densely populated state.  Bottom line, teachers are not paid market wages.  If they were paid market wages, taxes would have gone up much higher than they did.  Rather than attract more teachers with market wages (and increase taxes) politicians offer bloated benefit packages that don’t raise taxes today but instead push compensation way out into the future (for the next generation of assemblymen and congressmen to deal with).  That game, like the mortgage market, can continue to be played as long as municipal finance is cheap (low interest rates on state and municipal borrowing).  That, in a nut shell, is what you might see in the papers referred to as “extend and pretend.”  When the bond markets imploded and county governments in other states went (effectively) bankrupt, like Jefferson County, Alabama, the municipal bond market also was impacted.  Since states can’t cheaply extend debt out into the future, state deficits became a real immediate problem. 

On balance, most municipalities in New Jersey were far more fiscally responsible than our fearless leaders in Trenton.  When fiscally irresponsible financial institutions went under, rather than simply letting the banks fail, a massive transfer payment was made between Wall Street and the Federal Government:  Wall Street gets cash, Uncle Sam assumes the debt.  The same is happening in states like NJ:  Trenton gets cash, and otherwise marginally more prudent towns get massive budget cuts (and in some cases, get raided as is the case in New Milford).  It’s complicated, but I’d be happy to explain how Trenton effectively took cash from the New Milford Public School District, if asked.

For the record, Governor Christie is an idiot.  I’m not saying that because I’m a democrat (I’m not).  I’m saying that because it’s objectively true.  First, enhanced state aide offered in exchange for salary freezes was minimal (in effect, New Milford would have been in the same position without or without the “deal” Christie was offering in exchange for salary freezes and in that regard, voters were misled).  Second, state wide, these school district cuts were already slating 15,000 job cuts across the state and we can now expect that number to likely end up north of 20,000.  Adding to unemployment roles at this juncture, in and of itself, can only compound the problem: i.e. home prices and therefore tax roles can only go down with higher unemployment.  Third, teacher salaries themselves do little to cure fiscal imbalances since it’s the benefit side of the equation that balloons the deficit, in other words, not giving teachers a 3% raise next year would have done nothing to effect NJ’s total public debt (again, we have been horribly misled by what Christie has done here, and for the record, contrary to public opinion, many teachers in New Milford haven’t had raises in years).  Fourth, and most importantly, the quality of public schools is inextricably linked to value of homes in those towns.  The wealthiest communities in NJ will not be affected by this at all (think about it, Bergen County is an affluent county and also fairly conservative, the wealthier more republican parts of this county passed their budgets and, on balance, Bergen County had a fairly successful budget election process compared to the rest of the state).  On the other hand, the less affluent towns, like New Milford, will see a much bigger budget cut after the courts are through.  In essence, as usual, the rich get richer and, well, you know.  Christie, like all politicians, has, as you would expect, politicized this whole situation, misled voters, and, in the end, will do more harm than good. 

Taxes paid for public schools are good investment.  If you don’t care about the more altruistic cause of giving our kids good educations, at the least the selfish motive of preserving home prices should be enough.  As the budget stood before another corrupt politician screwed it up, taxes on average would have gone up by $70 per quarter or a little over $20 per month.  Times are tough and I’m with you on that, but $20 bucks?  How many people who voted down the budget bought a new iPad or some other frivolous thing this past quarter… money well spent I assure you… or maybe you put it on the credit card… don’t worry, you’ll pay it off eventually.

And for the finale, here is the real irony:  Christie clearly mobilized senior citizens in his plot to exact revenge on the teachers union for not backing his campaign.  All those seniors concerned about swelling deficits and heavy handed unions…  Thanks to the uneven distribution in population caused by World War II (the baby boomers), the Federal Government is effectively bankrupt, though no one wants to admit it.  Government entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, social security, and the host of other social safety net programs didn’t envision a world with more seniors than working age people.  If Christie were President, I wonder if he’d slash all those programs too to cure Washington’s unsustainable deficit.  Most of our federal taxes today and for the next several decades will fund entitlement programs for seniors with nothing left over for the workers that are paying in today.  Senior entitlements are producing the same effect on the Federal government that teacher and civil servant retirement benefits are having on state budgets.  Enjoy those entitlement programs, they’re on us!  If anyone doesn’t want to take me on my word on that one, I’d be happy to explain in more detail. 

 Many would be inclined to disagree with me and that’s fine.  I have no political allegiances.  Partisan politics are killing this country and wreaking havoc at every level of government.  In speaking about the Cold War, John F. Kennedy said “for in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet, we all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children’s future and we are all mortal.”  The folks in Trenton and DC should bear those words in mind… (and ironically, Kennedy was a better Republican than any of the red tie, elephant-pin wearing fools roaming the halls of the Capitol Building today.  The Dems of today would never have nominated JFK!!)

I’ll end this rant with one more JFK quote:

“For of those to whom much is given, much is required. And when at some future date the high court of history sits in judgment on each of us, recording whether in our brief span of service we fulfilled our responsibilities to the state, our success or failure, in whatever office we hold, will be measured by the answers to four questions: First, were we truly men of courage… Second, were we truly men of judgment… Third, were we truly men of integrity… Finally were we truly men of dedication?”

Budget FAIL = Intelligence FAIL.

So, like with everything else, our town budget was only important enough to 19% of registered voters. Wow. And to think that we lost by 27 votes. 27 votes!!! How pathetic.  Instead of the projected 18 cuts through the board of ed., we are now faced with potentially losing even more. And our taxes will go up regardless.

59% of budgets failed throughout NJ.  Worst results since 1976, I think.

Thank you Governor Christie for being the biggest d-bag I have ever had the displeasure of looking upon. Thanks for jeopardizing my kids’ futures. Thanks for encouraging the stupid people of the world to continue in their efforts to spread even more ignorance. It’s fabulous. Maybe NJ can join Texas in replacing our textbooks with the ones that reject evolution. I mean, we are essentially thwarting it anyhow.  Anyone ever see the movie “Idiocracy?” Silly, yes, but I’m beginning to think it is not too far off the mark.

My question to those who voted “no” is “What exaclty did you accomplish? and how fulfilling was it?” You’ve effectively just wasted time and energy because now the BOE has to rework and resubmit the budget, which then needs to be presented to a municipal court judge.  They are already trying to work with $1.5 million less in federal monies. What did you hope to acheive? Getting teachers fired? That is all that will come of this. Good riddance to those blood sucking freeloaders! 

In a perfect world those in charge would learn a good lesson about spenditure and by some magic, make it work on a depleted budget. They would clip coupons, search for better deals on copy paper, turn off lights to save money on the electric bill…

Our entire country has been out of control with spending for  a very, very long time. Our laziness and entitlement has gotten us into a whole lot of trouble. No one is going to fix it because no one can. In the end, we are all going to lose, one way or another. Health care, home values, the environment, food supply, social security, churches and their cell towers (had to throw that in there!!!); We are doomed, make no mistake.

  You would think, however, that we, in a feeble attempt at self preservation would, at the very least, try to salvage our children’s education in the hopes that one day we could rise again from the ashes.

I guess not.

 Congratulations. We are one step closer to total societal failure.

VOTE *YES* FOR THE BUDGET

It is absolutely imperative that everyone come out and vote on Tuesday. Regardless of what you have heard, we must vote yes for the budget.  People in their neverending ignorance will actually pay heed to Christie’s lies. Even if teachers accepted the pay freeze (which they would have to be smoking crack to accept) it would maybe pump $70,000 back into our district which is going to be suffering a $3 million deficit. 

Many of our favorite, not yet tenured teachers are going to be handed pink slips this week. Voting for the budget is the only chance we’ve got to keep them.

I WILL BE LOOKING FOR EVERYONE AT THE POLLS ON TUESDAY!!!