According to administration officials, they need to see government collection reports before they can adjust the austerity measures up or down. Wrong. If they make big cuts in personnel, they can cover essential government services. Finance officials reported that they have collected half of the $11 million they projected in the last two months of this current fiscal year. If they are correct about the drop in collections, huge cuts are inevitable. That the administration waited so long to admit what everyone knows already is a disservice to the public.
Consider CUC. It has near 400 employees, 81 of whom are in administration. Does anyone see anything wrong with this picture? Power generation has around 80 employees, about 50 too many compared with private operators here and anywhere else. Power distribution has an equal number of crew. The water division is stacked with people, as is the wastewater division which has one or two wastewater treatment facilities to manage and limited sewer hookups compared to similar sized communities around the world. Bottom line: Too many unqualified personnel which is another reason why CUC rates are so high. The citizens are paying for too many deadwood.
Government officials, however, would continue to have the public pay for unqualified personnel rather than discharge them to take on some of the thousands of jobs that the Department of Labor says are available in the private sector. CUC’s chief knows all this and should be given a free hand to manage the utility effectively and efficiently, without political interference or direction.
Sound of silence
ADDING to the fiscal crisis is the need to withdraw larger and larger sums of the Retirement Fund assets to meet annual operational outlays because the Fitial administration cannot keep pace with its own obligations to the pension fund. With last fiscal year’s withdrawal of $54 million (which will increase by $7 million this fiscal year), the Fund has an estimated $231 million left. If the stock market surges, the Fund balance goes up, but if it doesn’t, the Fund will have less.
At this rate, and if all things remain the same, the Retirement Fund has an estimated three to four years of solvency.
This is a big problem that continues to get bigger which is probably why you no longer hear any elected official grandstanding about it.
Indeed, if the Fund goes belly up (see “Alabama Town’s Failed Pension is a Warning” on our online edition), the entire community will be affected and the results are too awful to contemplate. The tragedy will be that it didn’t have to end up badly.
Senseless
ADMINISTRATION officials are being pressed to exempt the Aging Center from austerity cuts because it is primarily funded by the feds. This “request” makes sense. But if the center is to be exempt on that basis then every other program and government employee funded entirely by the U.S. must also be exempt.
Why the central government decided to make cuts to these positions when they are federally funded makes absolutely no sense. But besides the manamko’, no one else is complaining. Apparently, this is now a commonwealth where the corrupt and the inept govern over the cowed and the indifferent.
