I usually write about the goings-on, albeit somewhat obliquely, in the town where I live on Wednesdays because that's the day of the week the local newspaper, The Bulletin, publishes my rambling as a column within its pages. I/They have been doing that for over a decade (I admit it feels longer if you're been reading them).
This past week was a busy one in court for folks formerly associated with our public utilities which is NOT a private corporation like Eversource or United Illuminating but rather, community-owned, the Norwich Public Utilities.
Drew Rankin, James Sullivan, and John Bilda demonstrated the dangers when a public trust is treated like a private trough, and have been punished with prison terms and large amounts of public scorn. I'm not sure where justice ends and vengeance begins but the behavior they were accused of and for which they were found guilty puts the E in egregious and while for some there will never be enough punishment for others it's better a horrible ending than horrors without end.
All of that was going on while, as is true across our state, Norwich's City Council was struggling to finalize a municipal budget that, no matter its final shape, will make large portions of my neighbors unhappy because it will spend too much/too little (pick one or the other, or both in some cases) on matters closest to our hearts while allowing other line items to either be extravagantly funded or fiscally starved.
Lots of potential for acrimony and animus, most of it short-lived (we have memories like goldfish it's always seemed to me at this time of year), fueled slightly by a report in The Bulletin, based on publicly available information that in 2022, with a total budget of $145.6 Million, city employees were paid $69.8 Million.
More than one hundred municipal employees earned in excess of one hundred thousand dollars with the highest paid being a member of the police department, though, not the police chief, who received over two hundred and thirteen thousand dollars. Pretty impressive for what I think of as a small town where most of us know the rest of us, although it's a little less starry-eyed when described by the US Census Bureau.
We're slightly less glamorous as viewed by these folks.
In all honesty, I'm hard-pressed to figure out how we manage to afford the payroll we currently have, to say nothing about the pension obligations we are accruing by maintaining this level of compensation as deserved as I'm sure it is.
The role of and compensation for public service positions is long overdue for a careful and thoughtful analysis and examination as we slowly reach the tipping point where all we're doing is turning over our wealth to the people who are working for us. This may be an ideal moment to start that conversation. Everyone deserves to earn a fair wage, no less and certainly no more.
-bill kenny
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