School officials to the woodshed

All the heat about school financial problems are enough to give any parent shudders.
But let's look on the sunny side of this thing.
I've always had the view that tax-funded agencies either have money problems, serious money problems, financial crises or slash-and-burn money problems.
The first three categories usually involve very public announcements about how tight money is and how big cuts might have to be made. What these fail to account for is how much fat there is in a lot of these taxpayer funded budgets. The problem is that if you're like a school superintendent, there's no way you'll see all the fat and if you do see it, there's a lot of it you're not going to touch because you really don't want to be a boat-rocker or spit-disturber.
But a lot of school districts now are entering the slash-and-burn survival stage. And here's where it gets interesting. Because as push comes to shove (or slash comes to burn), everyone's going to start looking after their own hindends. And when it comes to protecting the fat on my butt, I'll willingly blow the whistle about the fat on your butt.
Throw in a few irate citizens and you have the makings of a fight to the death. Which means, at long last, some serious fat in these districts is going to get some serious scrutiny.
And that ain't all bad.
In fact, if I were a public school administrator at any level, I'd start sending out some resumes to see if anyone anywhere could use my current talents as, say, an English-as-a-second-language-in-the-study-of-Medieval-literature-curriculum-developer.

Nice ice festival

Congrats to all those who were involved in organizing and sponsoring the ice carving festival in downtown Monroe over the weekend.
I moseyed through the place and thought it was pretty and cool.
I expected to see a few more people, but for a first year thing it was a fairly respectable turnout on the two instances I strode by.
I did have a couple of disappointments.
First, why was it that some more businesses weren't open like on Saturday. There were some that seemed to be keeping extended hours, but it didn't seem like the whole downtown was behind this one.
Also, why couldn't there have been at least some street vendors. I would think you could have sold a ton of soup or hot chocolate or coffee from a cart on Loranger Square. Is this one of those cases where our government bureaucracy is just too much of a good thing?
I also thought that the community college was going to be represented. They always have a crew at the Plymouth ice festival. When we have one in the hometown, they're a no show?
We have to bring in people from Oakland?
Beyond that, it would have been nice to have a little more historic context, like maybe a poster board explaining how they used to harvest ice off the river in straw until the warmer months. (I think that's the story my grandfather used to tell).
One last thanks to Steve Alexander (aka Gen. Custer) for willingly freezing his historic ass off posing for pictures by the Custer ice sculpture.

What's the matter with Ed?

I apologize.
I've been accused of putting some sort of weird jinx on people or personalities that I've mentioned in this blog.
I'm guilty again.
No sooner did I dust off the "ethics problem" of Monroe City Councilman Ed Paisley, then a loyal reader calls my attention to a long and detailed thread on one of the Monroe Snooze forums on their Web site about Ed's ethics problem.
It goes into great detail about the problem Ed's facing (bigger than I thought, I admit), but the most fascinating part of the thread is the revelation that Ed was beat up by the state accountancy board for practicing without keeping his license current. Then he continued to practice without a license, so the state fined him $2,500 and put him on three years probation.
That's not only the stuff that can ruin your business, it also speaks volumes about Ed's ethics. I wonder if that makes his clients nervous at all?
Whatever.
So I apologize for mentioning Ed's name.
But to make up for it, I offer him some free legal advice:
Resign, Ed. Resign now.
No, I'm not a licensed attorney, but there's nothing wrong with practicing without a license, is there?

Such drama!

My, oh, my!
Everytime I leave town for a couple of days the doo-doo hits the Cuisinart.
First off, let's have a toast to good health on behalf of Mayor Al, who had the guts to tell the world about his prostate cancer. Good luck, thoughts and prayers go out to him. Love 'em or hate 'em, he's a tough ol' bird who will pull through this. I mean it probably won't be as bad as the knee replacements he's already gone through.
But this probably means he won't run again and it gives him a good excuse to bow out gracefully. That means Iacoangeli and Worrell might be facing each other unless they cut a deal of some sort, which is VERY possible.
The next question is whether Madame IKO will ease up on the ailing mayor.
Naw.
That's almost as likely as Ed Paisley fessing up that an ethical problem is usually 70 percent appearances and 30 percent reality and by that definition the good councilman had an ethics issue with respect to the Leski building. He would have been wise to make a preemptive strike, apologize for the appearances, and lay himself on the mercy of his colleagues. No, instead, this will be ground out some more.
Thanks anyway, Ed, for being the unwilling sacrificial lamb on this one. Maybe all the other skeletons -- oh and we all know whose they are -- will stay in their closets.
By the way, have you noticed that Ed is always wearing a Paisley tie?

Cat fight alert!

Yeow!
Janet the Bookworm Berns really dished up some nastiness about Madame IKO in the letters column of today's Monroe Snooze.
I won't get into the particulars, but Janet called Councillady Compora everything but a John Iacoangeli (the ex-mayor that Janet despised too).
Actually, the letter indicated that Compora is a latter day Sen. Joe McCarthy, the blowhard red-baiter who blacklisted everybody in the post World War II days.
Faithful Monroe city council watchers know that Compora is doing her best to make life miserable for Mayor Al Cappuccilli and his cronies (methinks it must've been a campaign promise).
It's great theater, but sometimes a bit ill-focused and ham-fisted.
Whatever.
But two things are kind of funny about the Berns letter, which was really cool no matter whether you agree with it or not.
One is that Berns and Compora are a lot alike. The main difference is that Compora seems willing to spit in your face while Berns prefers back-stabbing, which she turned into a high art during the Iacoangeli administration. I guess turnabout is fair play.
Which brings me to the second point: McCarthy was big on blacklisting. It tarnished the reputation of individuals and sometimes ruined their careers.
I applaud Berns for voicing her opinion. But do you think she knows or cares at all what it might do to her business? My guess is quite a few folks already have her store on their blacklists.
My mom ran a business for many years in the Monroe area. She was very conscious about her public image and its affect on her business. In fact, she never wanted to put her picture in any ads because she always said half the people who saw it would hate her because she was too pretty and half would hate her because she was too ugly.
Either way, it wouldn't be good for business.

Roundabouts coming round again?

The lousy drivers who keep hitting the pedestrian islands along N. Custer might have driven a stake through the heart of this idea for good, but I wouldn't be surprised if the old "roundabout" plan that ex-Mayor Iko dreamed up might someday rear its odd little knobby head, no matter which poor slob (or slobess?) ends up being the next mayor of MONroe. I read a thing in one of the national newsmagazines (was it Time or Newsweek? Maybe neither) that said roundabouts are the hot ticket for easing traffic congestion in cities across the nation. They not only "calm" the traffic, they keep it moving. Given the increase in homes and traffic around here, I predict you'll see one in Monroe within the next decade. How about one in Loranger Square? It'll be loads of fun when the public servants make their lemming-like runs for the long weekend.

Did she say consolidate?

Gov. Granholm's state of the state address tonight sounded like a bit of bad news for local governments.
She seemed to be saying she'd tie local revenue sharing payments to local governments that prove they're consolidating services. Those that don't will be penalized.
Looks like someone better accelerate plans to meld fire departments and police agencies.

I know Judge Joe made up his own mind

Your humble servant admittedly isn't so humble. If I was, I wouldn't remind you that I predicted on this blog on Dec. 8, 2006 that Bedford wouldn't be getting a walmart anytime soon.
Tonight's Monroe Snooze notes that Judge Joe Costello kinda slamdunked the Whitman's lawsuit against Bedford Township. If the township had lost, the Walmart steamroller would have been going full steam ahead with its creepy smiley faces.
Now a lot of people will leap to the conclusion that Judge Joe is a faithful reader of this blog and had his opinion swayed by my earlier prediction.
It just ain't so.
He told me he made up his own mind even after he read the prediction.
That's why our system of justice is the best on the planet.

It's Vern's idea, not mine

While the city's bean counters still try to come up with ways to pinch every last penny, here's a suggestion I got from my rural cousin, Vern.
Vern says fire the city's trash hauler.
Vern is pretty ignorant, but he's not that ignorant because he used to live in the city.
Now that he lives in the country, he pays for his own trash pickup.
Vern doesn't really care how I get my trash picked up and he doesn't care about how much I pay in taxes. He does care how long it takes him to come over to my house on any given evening so he can try to sponge a dinner from me.
Well, he happened to come down my street on trash pickup day. As my neighbors can tell you, after the trash haulers come through, there's usually trash containers littering the streets. Driving a car sometimes can be like maneuvering a mine field.
Vern says he wouldn't pay a dime for that kind of service.
I almost told him I don't pay for it.
Ain't I an idiot.
I figure the city's spending at least a quarter million on trash pickup that's substandard, by Vern's standards. He says the hauler he hired never misses a day, is courteous, puts the containers back where they came from and even comes back to pickup if he puts his garbage out a bit late.
Then I got to thinking. The little old lady who puts out a half-filled trash can is getting nailed, tax-wise, the same as the city resident who puts out four trash cans.
Vern says in the country, you basically pay on the basis of how much trash you want picked up.
So you pay more if you want unlimited pickup, you pay less if you don't.
Even if this might cost more than the per capita tax dollars each city resident has to pay, where's it say that city residents should be entitled to free, private trash pickup as part of city services. That's just a throwback to the times when the city ran its own trash pick up.
The argument would be that we can deprive citizens of a city service. But that's what happened when someone figured out that leaf pickup was too expensive.
So what's the big deal.
Besides, most big trash hauling companies have historic ties to organized crime.
Why should city tax dollars subsidize that?