Ethics and Pensions

With the scandals that rocked the city of Bell, it's been suggested that we need to look in our own back yard. Anonymous asked if someone wouldn't bring forth the evidence of wrongdoing in our city. I'm not personally privy to anything that would rise to that level where a prosecutor would be interested, but I'm very aware of some things going on that are of very questionable ethics.

The most recent case-in-point was the "gaming" of the system by Councilmember Cristina Carrizosa to significantly increase her retirement once she leaves the city council. While it appears that she did nothing illegal, the ethics of this situation is certainly in question.

But even more importantly to me, is that the problems in Bell have been linked to citizens' not being aware of what was going wrong with their city. Here in Pomona, we have several blogs and some decent reporting that has stanched many of the grevious problems. A few years ago a few members of the city council decided that they should also get paid (separately) for being the redevelopment agency. Citizens found out about it and rose up and stopped it. I'm currently on the city's Charter Review Commission and we are looking at the possibility of creating an ethics oversight commission within the city and strengthening the ethics for the council, commissions, city management, police, candidates for office, and others under the perview of the charter, all to enhance citizen oversight to avoid the problems that Bell ran into.

However, I have an even more basic question. SHOULD PART-TIME COUNCILMEMBERS BE GETTING A PENSION AT ALL? Those in the private sector who work part-time usually don't get any benefits. This is the way that banks, grocery stores, and WalMart have been keeping their costs down for years. By hiring people and limiting their work hours to under 30 per week, they don't pay retirement, medical, and other benefits. Why are we so generous to our city council members?

Public service is not supposed to enrich those who are serving. To suggest that council members are doing such an extraordinary job as part-time employees negates the work of all of the others who work part time at little or no personal benefit (do you hear me unpaid commissioners?). Councilwoman Carrizosa stated that she "earned" the additional pension money. So that means that she worked harder than councilmembers Lantz, Atcheley, Saunders, Rodriquez, Soto, and Mayor Rothman? I undestand that their pension will be based on a $9600/year salary (the mayor twice that) and not what they got from their full-time jobs.

Again, this is not about what is legal, but about what is ETHICAL and FAIR.

I look forward to the comments on this item.

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Remember, August 2nd the council will decide whether or not to put replacing Pomona's Police Department on the ballot. I will be out of town and can't attend. I'm fairly sure that the council knows where I stand on this issues as I've spoken on it in the past. If you haven't spoken out, do so!!!

A Grammatical Rant

It's been kind of quite here in the blogosphere lately, so I take this opportunity to vent on a subject that bugs the heck out of me.

I was reading the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin this morning and one of my MAJOR issues was there staring me in the face. Was it corruption in Pomona? No. Was it the dismantling of our history? No.

I was faced with this sentence in an article on page A3 by Canan Tasci on parking problems at Chaffey College: ". . . and that increases the amount of people trying to park on campus." Because the offending phrase was used in a direct quote I can't blame Canan Tasci, but it's usually OK for a reporter to clean up any obvious grammar problems. I'm sure that there was probably a "you know" or "like" in there that didn't make it into the quote (just speculation). The problem is that I've seen this type of thing in a LOT of stories in the newspaper (from some good writers) and heard in constantly in TV and radio news reporting. I guess copy editing is one of the victims of the changes in the news industry.

The grammar rule is that if you use a number word (few, fewer, more, less, number, amount, etc.) that a singular noun has to be an amount. You cannot have a number gasoline, but you can have an amount of gasoline so it would be "less gasoline," not fewer gasoline. When a noun is a plural, such a cows, you have a "number of cows," not an amount of cows. Amount refers to "volume" while number refers to (hold on) number. The same is true for less and fewer. Less refers to volume and is used on singular nouns (less gasoline, less cereal, less stress) and fewer refers to plural numbers (fewer cars on the road, fewer accidents on the highways, fewer pills I have to take for the stress).

One of the places where this first reared its ugly head was in grocery checkout lines. The sign above one or two of the lines began reading "10 items or less." The noun items is clearly plural, so it should have been "10 items or fewer" which just didn't sound right. Actually a better sign would have read "fewer than 11 items," but we don't want to go there. This has caused the whole, plural vs. singular noun numbers words thing completely out of whack. We now hear that there were "less people than last year," "less cars on freeway on Fridays," etc.

AT LEAST: Our own local Stater Brothers market does have a sign above the two registers at the south end of the store that state, "15 items or fewer."

This post is a repeat of one on my own personal blog. My personal blog does not carry Pomona Specific entries (that I'll continue to do here as long as Meg allows me to), but my take on issues of importance beyond Pomona. If you're so inclined, you can view by blog HERE