A New Perspective: Living up to expectations

Despite being referred to as the "silly season," elections are the best way to keep government running smoothly. As the election draws near, elected officials finally start to pay more attention to their constituents than to staff, whose best interest is to grow government and protect their job security through power positioning.

Golden Gate Fire Commissioner Matt Hudson finally saw the light, last week, and changed his 'raise taxes' mantra. He realized that while population numbers were rising between 5 to 7 percent a year, employee costs were rising 20 to 28 percent a year for the past five years.

That's bad government. It costs each man, woman and child twice as much money to fund the fire department than it did five years ago. It is unacceptable government budgeting at best.

Our fire union and administrators have negotiated exceedingly well with their pay packages over the past five years, and it finally broke the bank. The board has realized the answer isn't to raise taxes, but to budget with realistic expectations.

The funniest logic I've heard yet for raising fire salaries came out of the East Naples Fire Department this week. The board decided to level up the salaries for all deputy chiefs to make the accounting process easier.

It will 'only' cost the district $2,000 more this year. We can always get more tax money. That tax money comes from you and me. A little here and a little there, it all adds up. You won't find many well-run businesses choosing to increase costs to save time writing out the paychecks.

There were some celebrations for area teachers, principals and students, last week. Many schools had big jumps in their state grades.

We know how hard our schools work and the challenges they face in this community. Having those efforts validated is a great thing.

Now the divisive part will be divvying up the reward money that comes with the improved grades. If you've ever served on a school advisory committee, you know the heartache this brings. Even if you give it all to the staff who worked so hard to bring up the grades, there is significant discord. Ironically, those who pulled together at the oars, now start to argue about who pulled harder.

At one meeting, a tearful advisory board member noted she wished the school had never received the money because of the unhappiness it caused. Even so, if we want the schools to be run more like a business, then we ought to reward the employees with bonuses. The school district should take care of the needed improvements to the school and any additional funds should go to our educators.

Now, the next area of concern — who wants to send their child to a school isn't bringing its grade up? The heat should be turned up on those schools and administrators. Low performance at any level should not be an acceptable situation. We need to hear some solutions to poor performance rather than excuses.

Just like students, is much more difficult for some schools to attain and retain good grades, but to be satisfied with anything less and expect anything less isn't the American way.

In every other area of life, we have to overcome rather than be a victim. That needs to be shown by leadership at the schools and in the administration. We should expect nothing less.