Local government growing fast

To the editor:

Have salaries and benefits in the public sector grown faster than in the private sector? Do the business units of local government have the same level of productive accountability as their private business counterparts?

Recently, there have been a number of articles in The Gazette about city and county government budgets. A good deal of emphasis has been on raising salaries of government officials.

One thing stands out to me as I analyze the data increasingly available on the Internet. Local government is a great place to work as salaries and benefits far exceed those available in all but the most prestigious private sector jobs. But are we taxpayers getting the most bang for the buck for our investment?

In the private sector, technology has dramatically changed the way we work. But any encounter with government reveals not so much change there. One example is the way government data is reported as tiny type claims payments in the newspaper. Scrooge would easily recognize the tiny type ledger pages we taxpayers get from our government officials. Why do we not see easy to read charts and graphs and dashboards with weekly updates?

Just asking, with such high salaries and benefits demanded from our well compensated local government officials, why are we not seeing the kind of business intelligence every business today needs to operate? Especially when local government has become one of, if not the, largest business entity in our local economies.

Thomas Simon

Mount Vernon