Good morning, Whitewater
City offices in Whitewater are closed today — your path to the holiday is unobstructed.
Over at the Janesville Gazette, there’s a great story about how the Janesville City Manager is eliminating several vacant positions, and consolidating others. In a story entitled, “City manager proposes job consolidation,” reporter Beth Wheelock reveals that
….In a memo to the City Council, City Manager Eric Levitt recommends eliminating four vacant positions and broadening the scope of three others, which would provide a cost savings of $275,000 in 2010.
The change would take effect this year, but the positions are included in the 2009 budget. The positions on the chopping block include the Assistant Director of Administrative Services, Director of Leisure Services, Economic Development Assistant and Sustainability Coordinator….
Without this story, how many in Janesville would have even know that the City of Janesville taxed residents for these salaries?
Janesville, with every economic problem in America, all compacted into a tiny space of 28.1 square miles, has a paid Director of Leisure Services?
It’s both astonishingly arrogant and stupid that a community would have a Director of Leisure Services. It’s arrogant to think that government should be proving for leisure, as though without a city manager, common council, or any number of bureaucratic hangers on, a community would have no idea how to organize activities for children, the middle aged, the elderly, whatever.
(The Janesville Department of Leisure services website is available for your review. There’s still time to attend the ‘Spring Fling Potluck and Dance Party,’ scheduled for April 14.)
It’s also astonishingly stupid for a city government, in a city with double-digit unemployment, to pay a bureaucrat to be the Director of Leisure Services. This money should be better spent elsewhere.
Assistant Director of Administrative Services? Is that for the person who takes over Administrative Services when the Director of Administrative Services is visiting — wait for it — Leisure Services, for golfing, or the farmers’ market, or the latest town dance?
Oh, sorry, now I understand — it’s like having a Vice President, isn’t it?
Still, in a more evolved bureaucracy, someone would call this the Director of Contingent Developmental Activities. No one would have any idea what that position actually directed, and would feel embarrassed to offer criticism. Leisure Services is just too, well, candid.
Thanks, Janesville.