Commissioners strike a blow for responsible governance
In rejecting a fact-finder’s report, the commissioners of Mahoning County, Anthony Traficanti, Carol Rimedio-Righetti and David Ditzler, have delivered a clear — and long overdue — message to a group of unionized government employees: Get your heads out of the clouds. We trust that other officeholders who have the awesome responsibility of spending taxpayer dollars with care will follow the commissioners’ lead and reject any demands by public workers that border on the ridiculous.
The private sector in the Mahoning Valley should serve as a guide for government on matters of wages and benefits.
Traficanti, Rimedio-Righetti and Ditzler deep-sixed a report from fact-finder Robert F. Stein of Kent that said the unionized employees of the county’s Child Support Enforcement Agency should each receive three additional paid personal days off in 2014. Stein also recommended the county financially reward (our word) the members of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3577 for paying the entire employee share of the public-pension contributions.
Ditzler, who is completing his first year as a commissioner and comes from the private sector, put the paid-days-off issue in perspective when he said, “You can’t open the door for three additional personal days because then, every department looks at it, and you could end up with 1,800 employees with three additional personal days” throughout county government.
COMMISSIONERS ARE NO GRINCHES
Before you accuse the commissioners of Grinch-like behavior, consider this: the CSEA employees now receive four paid personal days off annually.
Also consider the fact that the agency is facing a $260,000 budget deficit.
As for the pension contributions, a public employee is supposed to pay 10 percent of his or her salary, while the government (read that taxpayers) pays 14 percent. However, it is standard operating procedure for officeholders to dip into the public treasury to pay most of the employee’s share. That has enabled them to say they have not given pay raises.
In the case of the CSEA workers, the county now pays all but 0.50 percent of the 10 percent employee pension contribution — in addition to the 14 percent employer share.
Fact-finder Stein was on the right track when he said the AFSCME members should be responsible for the entire amount of the employee contribution. But he went off the rails with his recommendation that they receive pay increases to evenly compensate for that change.
Pay raises — in the midst of an anemic national economy and the loss of unemployment benefits to thousands of Ohioans as of Saturday? We think not.
As we have said time and again, government employees have come through the national recession that began in late 2008 virtually unscathed.
There’s no need to reward them with pay raises and other sweeteners — not when the folks paying their salaries and benefits are barely keeping their heads above water.