Stop making excuses; cut jobs

Stop making excuses; cut jobs

Please continue to write ed- itorials about Mahoning County’s elected officials and to give the over-burdened taxpayers a financial break.

On one hand the Mahoning County prosecutor proposes a hefty increase in his office’s annual budget of a whopping 60 percent, because the county lacks high-caliber attorneys as his assistants. Then on the other hand, he tells the media that the county must use courtroom strategies where “plea bargains” for lawbreakers are the only way to contend with the high volume of court cases. Otherwise, he states publicly, our court systems would be clogged up. Question: Shouldn’t any young person with a degree in law, and having passed the Ohio Bar Association tests, be able to read from a prepared script in offering defendants a reduced sentence for a plea of guilty? If refused, then of course, the more seasoned or higher paid lawyer, or perhaps the prosecutor himself could step up to the plate.

In my opinion, the Mahoning County courts are already clogged up. That’s why we have dozens and dozens of non-elected court supervisors called “magistrates” doing most of the court cases. The ever increasing use of magistrates ranks in the same category as the county commissioners using an administrator. This says to me that our duly elected county representatives get to shirk their original, people-mandated responsibilities. It also gives them more free time, on taxpayers dollars, to attend fundraisers and other social functions because another election is right around the corner. And speaking of elections, why weren’t voters in the past made aware by those wishing to gain the office of the prosecutor, judges and commissioners, that the seekers weren’t totally qualified to handle the guidelines for the jobs and would, in fact, need additional, highly trained assistants, magistrates and administrators?

The saving-money factor is often mentioned when politicos defend themselves when questioned about filling these non-elected lawyers, magistrates and administrative jobs. Their collective mantra is these jobs are necessary to be equal to other counties in Ohio. Really? Too bad that all those other counties’ unemployment figures are never brought into these financial debates.

David Metzler, North Jackson