HUGE SERVERENCE PACKAGES FOR RECYCLED CITY EMPLOYEES

I wouldn't be surprised what Czarlton and his henchmen try to pull-off. I'm really going to keep a close eye on this one.

..you're kidding me, right?

This is the continaution of the LCDP manipulation.

Anyone but me noticing the recent changes in government and the sudden "urgency" to circumnavigate the Charter and other laws to position themselves for 2008?

The real problem is that these stunts have been going on for so long that it's now become "procedure without recourse".

What cracks me up is you guys WANT to live within this. I see the same Dems from the mid 90's still running the show into the ground, right? It ain't ME that's electing them.

Why aren't non-partisian people willing to put forth their time to purge these miscreants and hooligans from office, get elected, open the books and clean this mess up?

What, you don't think public displays of attention shining lights into dark corners exposing this bullshit pony show that Szollozi is carrying from Chris' breakfast the other week, right?

Betcha $100 if real citizens get elected into office and open the books and show everyone what was REALLY going on, you'd have one hell of a lynching party.

So the Dems strike fear while manipulating the rules to keep y'all down.

I wonder what the Republicans are doing. With all this unacceptable behavior by the Dem's are they capitalizing or are they just sitting around with their thumbs op their butts? Look at the Dem's track record. Stripper gate, doggy gate, Morehead, Daugherty, Griffin gate, Dillon Gate, Jim Jackson gate, high level officials' spouses getting sloppy drunk on Broadway Blvd, reckless endangerment. They have a fine record, don't you think?

James...about the R's locally.

I think the main issue with the Lucas County Republican party is that it has, to my knowledge, never created a platform specific to NW Ohio and relied too much on the generic platitudes of the national party.

They should be applying their unified beliefs, that they've come to from research and debate, to very specific local issues then recruit candidates who believe the same and can articulate the message. Moreover, they have to make sure that they are educating their party leaders/volunteers on those principals along with their local application of them so there is an understanding that extends further than just talk-radio and will provide a bench-mark for judging the effectiveness of the party/elected officials.

The result of the LCRP not having an mission or platform is that everyone is judging the quality of their elected officials by a different set of standards; a ship without a rudder if you will.

The lack of a plan specific to Lucas County cripples their ability to critque their opponents (although how do you oppose something that isn't there), recruit volunteers and raise money let alone begin to change how the city/county is run. What is it that the LCRP believes that is different from the D's who've been running the show for 40+ years; I have no idea what their alternative is because they don't have one yet.

In my opinion, simply getting people elected for the sake of getting them elected is not a plan for success but it's been the standard procedure for the party for as long as I've been observing.

Politicians always say, "their isn't a Republican or Democrat way to pick of the trash or keep the streets safe." This may be true to some extent, however there is an efficient way and an inefficient way to handle those issues; the LCRP needs to own the efficent management agenda and develop a plan to do so.

Matt Holdridge
The Toledo Tattler

P.S. excuse the typos :-)

Matt Holdridge
The Toledo Tattler

...to get the best talent the city government can get? I mean, don't executives in private industry get severance packages (hell, they demand them, don't they?). If Toledo wants to settle on a draft to fill its upper positions then it might make sense to eliminate severance packages from the offers of employment. I mean you get a call one day that you are now in charge of Solid Waste, report tomorrow morning, and if you don't succeed we'll hire someone else in the next week. No offer of a severance package, just "drafted" until they can find some other fool to fill the slot.

Or we could let the employees "administer" themselves. They might work okay. If human beings are as honest, and upright as I like to believe then we don't need managers. If I am wrong, then we do. And we have to find some way to attract them (unless they're damned fools). And one of the ways is to offer incentives such as severance packages. There might a small amount of belief in "public service", but only a fool gives his services for free, or near enough. Maybe a "draft" might be a good idea. It worked well for the services. Look at the quality of people we got 35 years ago.

four years..two in Eritrea, last 10 months at Ft Bragg, NC.

Your defending the city in every little action they do,is becoming nauseating....

...not that city managers and administrators are getting severance packages, but that there is public service in Toledo at all. What Toledo needs is to fire all its employees, and hire/contract out private firms to do the work (except maybe safety, but there are some libertarians that want that contracted out).

If we did this there would be no argument about severance packages. The firms would contract with the city, charge what the market would bear, and contract their managers and administrators like private firms do (their managers would haggle to get the best deal they could).

...in response to the original post.

Many public employees are allowed, under both city charter and state law, to collect payment for unused sick time, vacation time and/or comp time.

Traditionally, no local government pays a lump sum that is NOT tied to these accumulated/earned times already on the books.

In the case of many upper level administrators, they tend to accumulate large numbers of days/hours in these categories. Unless they've had a major medical issue, people in these types of positions rarely use sick time. Often, they're eligible for comp time in lieu of overtime or may have negotiated a certain amount of comp time (say 200 hours which the fed. gov. sets as a limit) that they can accumulate. And then, with earning more vacation the longer you're employed - and being able to carry over service time from one job to another for purposes of determining the amount of eligible vacation - they're likely to earn 5-7 weeks per year - which they rarely take.

By the time all this earned time is totaled and paid out upon retirement, it can amount to huge dollar figures. Most governmental entities anticipate such payouts in their accounting processes and many often have a fund set aside specifically for this purpose. Others budget a set amount each year to fund any payments that may occur each year.

It's costly, but the solution to this is to have local ordinances that excempt certain level administrators from the payouts to which civil servants or union-covered members are entitled. However, that rarely happens. In fact, the 'me-too' mentality usually applies anything negotiated by unions to the administrative staffs, as a matter of course.

...but rather compensation they've "earned" by going beyond the minimum for working their jobs. Since they can't get stock options (as a private corporation might offer it's valued upper echelon), or "free" health care, they receive a generous vacation time that they often don't use, and cash in at the end of their career (at a higher price per hour given raises that have occurred through time). I know the max for vacation in the postal service was 26 days (five work weeks and a day)a year (which we had to take in whole weeks) so seven weeks sounds pretty generous. Our local contract also required that we take what we "earned" so we couldn't take any extra weeks we had accumulated. When I had to retire suddenly to take care of my father I turned in 21 days of vacation that I had been carrying since my first year of employment. It helped until I got my first pension check two months later.