What Else Don't We Know About?

Governor Paterson is making a clarion call to anyone who will listen that New York State is in desperate financial straits. Mayor Bloomberg is making a case that New York City needs to skirt the law calling for term limits that will force him out of office because the city needs his guidance through the financial difficulties that lay ahead. Elected officials at the county, town and village levels are singing the blues.

It would seem to make sense that they are. Everybody is hurting - why shouldn't government be feeling the pinch?

Then you read a story like the one Juan Gonzalez wrote in today's Daily News. Apparently the New York City Board of Education sees nothing wrong with spending $5 million in 2008 for private couriers - more than double the messenger tab before Schools Chancellor Joel Klein took over in 2002. Apparently the couriers are paid to pick up the tests from all schools and deliver them to the Department of Education's computer center in Queens. There is no explanation as to why using an overnight delivery service is not good enough.

There is also the $80 million contract NYC DOE awarded to CTB McGraw-Hill a few years ago to design all of the new assessment tests and score them. Or the $80 million contract to IBM for ARIS, the new computer database that will track all information about students, including all those test scores.

The point is this: Is anyone in government paying attention to spending that's going on? What other out-of-control spending is going on that we don't know about?

In business you watch every dime because what goes out the door comes out of the owner's pocket. Not so in government. The LIRR's disability scandal is another case in point. LIRR officials claim to be outraged that this is going on, but nobody would have done anything if the New York Times hadn't looked into the situation. And Newsday's probe of attorneys and elected officials helping themselves to state pensions that they should not be entitled to is also quite scary.

Don't even get me started about the state, the county and the Town of East Hampton lining the pockets of Dick Cavett to the tune of $18 million - buying property that no private developer would touch.

Who's looking out for the taxpayer? Who in government is going to recognize that we the taxpaying public can no longer afford to just keep feeding the cash trough? When will the we the taxpayer rise up as one and say ENOUGH!

I can only hope that this difficult economic climate we are enduring right now will result in greater scrutiny of government spending. It is incumbent upon us as taxpayers to demand the same lean and mean operations from government that we are required to maintain as business people.

Nice Work If You Can Get It

One look at the news of the day and you have a much better understanding of why things are in such bad shape.

For starters, according to published reports a NYS Parole Board commissioner and former NYS Assemblyman was charged yesterday with trying to lure two pre-teen sisters to an Albany-area hotel room for sex. If that isn't bad enough - and it is pretty bad - the man gets paid $102,000 a year for his part-time work on the Parole Board. Think about that the next time you sign a check to the New York State Tax Department.

And just to add insult to injury, the top brass at AIG were at it again. Four top AIG executives spent $86,000 on a partridge hunt at an English country manor as the feds gave their struggling firm billions to stay afloat, according to a story in the New York Daily News.

What a better place the world would be if we all just stuck to doing an honest day's work for an honest dollar.

Where's the Accountability?

If LIBI members ran their businesses the way the government goes about its daily operations, the world would be in a lot more trouble than it is in right now.

Take these news items, for instance.

This morning's New York Daily reports that "despite enacting a state hiring freeze, the Paterson administration created a $140,000-a-year job for a recently retired Queens assemblyman. Ivan Lafayette, 78, was named deputy superintendent for community affairs at the state Insurance Department...The higher pay will also help him boost his pension, which is based on the combined average of the last three years of a person's salary."

Closer to home, the North Shore Sun has a cover story this week detailing how the Suffolk County Deparment of Public Works changed the speed limit signs on the William Floyd Parkway to 45 miles per hour from 55 mph. What's newsworthy about that? Funny you should ask.

Turns out the Brookhaven Town Board voted to lower the speed limit in 1992! It took 16 years but SC DPW finally got around to posting the new limits!

Or how about this one from the Sunday New York Times: "Virtually every career employee — as many as 97 percent in one recent year — applies for and gets disability payments soon after retirement, a computer analysis of federal records by The New York Times has found. Since 2000, those records show, about a quarter of a billion dollars in federal disability money has gone to former L.I.R.R. employees, including about 2,000 who retired during that time.

"The L.I.R.R.’s disability rate suggests it is one of the nation’s most dangerous places to work. Yet in four of the last five years, the railroad has won national awards for improving worker safety."

Now, I don't know Ivan Lafayette from Marquis de Lafayette, I rarely drive on the William Floyd and I know my brother in-law works real hard at his job at the LIRR. I mention these items because they epitomize why Long Islanders get socked with some of the highest taxes in the region. Inefficiencies and government officials "taking care of each other" have been the norm for way too long. Long Islanders have to start holding our elected officials more accountable because we can no longer afford business as usual.

Years ago I attended an LIA breakfast featuring the two county executives reporting on the state of their respective economies. One of them went on and on about how he had reduced the number of "non-essential" employees on the county payroll. One of the business owners at my table looked around at his table mates and wondered aloud, "How many 'non-essential' employees do you have on your payroll?"

LIBI members have all taken measures to stay "lean and mean," and more often than not these measures required painful decisions involving valued employees. It's time we started demanding the same painful decisions - and lean and mean results - from our elected officials.