The Boston Herald sponsored a debate at UMass Lowell between Congressmen Lynch and Markey who are vying for the Democratic Party nomination to run for U.S. Senate.

You can view that debate online at The Boston Herald web site.

I think this was a much better run debate than the similar one at UMass Lowell for the Senate seat now held by Elizabeth Warren.  The questions from the students were much more on point than the ones in the previous debate.  I think the candidates did a good job in showing you who they are and how they would operate in the Senate.

In my opinion, Ed Markey is still the better choice.  It may be a fine point, but there is a time and a place to show your disagreement with members of your own party and another time and place where you have to make a decision as to whether or not to unite as a party and support a piece of legislation.  You can see from many of the posts on this blog, even one I posted today, where I show my vehement opposition to something that our President has done or said.  However, when it comes down to a crucial vote, you have to decide whether to accept the best deal that you can get, or take nothing.  Both Ed Markey and Stephen Lynch have made decisions on both sides of this spectrum of choices. I am in agreement with Ed Markey’s choices more than I am in agreement with Stephen Lynch’s.

It also helps to remember the lesson that Senator Kerry learned in his run for President.  A good resume is a great thing to have, but it is not enough to get you elected.  Stephen Lynch touted his resume about how he started an underprivileged life and rose as far as he did.  In fact, his resume is not that much different from Ed Markey’s nor Elizabeth Warren’s who he seems to think are elitist.  At least in Senator Kerry’s case he did have a resume that few candidates could match, especially his opponent at the time.

MoveOn.org has the item Senator Elizabeth Warren Knows A Bad Deal For The American People When She Sees One

Elizabeth Warren, that’s my senator. I hope the one we will elect to replace John Kerry sees this matter the same way.

McClatchy News has the story Senate candidate seeks ruling on contributions by gay couples.   I guess I did not read the the opening paragraph carefully enough.

While they await a Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, gay rights advocates are taking their fight to a new arena: campaign finance law.

Otherwise I would not have been so surprised at the following:

A pro-gay-marriage Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts has asked the Federal Election Commission to determine whether gay couples have the right to make joint contributions to political candidates.

In a request for an advisory opinion Friday, attorneys for State Rep. Dan Winslow, a moderate Republican running in a special election to fill the seat vacated by Secretary of State John Kerry, asked the commission whether gay couples can donate to his campaign with a single check, as heterosexual married couples are allowed to do.

I am proud to say that some Massachusetts Republicans do not fit the mold of many of the Republicans from other states.

WCVB – Report: Sturbridge Fire Department in deplorable condition.

A scathing report released Friday calls the Sturbridge Fire Department mismanaged and says it puts the public in unnecessary danger.

Thanks to JimG for bringing this to my attention.  I have heard hints of trouble in the fire department from people in town who know a lot more than I do.   I presume that calling for an independent consultant was the current Board of Selectmen’s way of finally getting a handle on the situation.   I applaud them for trying to fix what may be broken.  I just hope that they can remember to avoid fixing what isn’t broken.

He also denied he was a poor manager, saying he has done the best he could with the resources given.

But the report states for many years he returned funds to the town budget instead of using them for maintenance as allocated.

When asked why, he said he was “just being a nice guy.”

In light of my recent posts, Proposed Sturbridge Department Head Residency Requirements and Municipal Residency Requirements and the Local Economy, this demonstrates one of the down sides, that I thought about but did not mention, of insisting department heads be Sturbridge residents.  In the justification for residency requirements was the following:

…and to foster the general economic benefits which result from spending ones salary in the employing community, while sharing associated local tax burdens and creating a greater sense of ownership within the community; the Town of Sturbridge hereby establishes the following residency requirements:

Apparently, in the fire chief’s case, he was so concerned with not spending too much of his own taxes, he decided to return some of the maintenance money to the town instead of spending it on required maintenance.

At non-resident department head might be more willing to tell the town what was honestly needed and then spend the money appropriately.  This is not to say we should propose a rule that department heads cannot be Sturbridge residents.  What I do mean to say is that we should focus on hiring high quality department heads, not inserting irrelevant requirements in our hiring policies.  If something is a legitimate basis for judging a candidate, then there should be more proof to it than a conjecture that seems plausible to some .

Remember, that the word plausible is not a synonym for the word true.

In a previous post, Proposed Sturbridge Department Head Residency Requirements, I stated my negative opinions of a rumored attempt to institute residency requirements for department heads of municipal departments.  From a management relations and from a humane perspective, I thought the idea was terrible.

I decided to do a little research to see if any of the purported reasons for the proposal had ever been verified by actual economic or social science research.

The research shows there are pros and cons to the idea depending on economic circumstances, size of municipality, and perceptions of fair play.  In my opinion, the cons outweigh the pros pretty substantially for the Town of Sturbridge.

I did find a number of reviews of legal opinions that indicated that the courts find that the municipalities are within their legal rights to institute these requirements.

I found a paper, Institute for Research on Poverty – Discussion Papers – Municipal Residency Requirements and the Local Economy, that had some interesting background on this issue.

One of the little-noticed developments in American municipal administration in the 1970s was the explosive revival of an old machine-era device, the city residency law for public employees. In this paper, using information based on a survey of 85 cities, residency laws are explained not so much as a tool of public personnel management as an attempt to combat local unemployment and encourage the spending of city salaries in the local economy. The adoption of residency laws is in fact associated with unemployment, fiscal hardship, population loss, and black political influence. Local residency laws may be viewed as efforts by municipal governments to combat some of the causes of municipal fiscal distress.
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One of the little-remarked developments in American municipal administration during the 1970s was the explosive revival of an old machine-era device, 1 the residency requirement for public employees; In an age of increasing rationalization of personnel systems, students of public administration will find this a puzzling countertrend. I shall suggest, however, that the resurrection of residency laws may best be understood not as an aspect of personnel management, but rather as one of the various local government efforts to combat municipal fiscal distress. An examination of residency laws in this light not only helps to explain why modern administrators have been willing to revive a device associated with the spoils system but also the growing popularity of these laws in the face of almost universal and bitter opposition by the public employees they constrain.  In a period in which tensions between urban managers and their employees run high over issues such as cost of living adjustments and affirmative action, the injection of an issue such as the residency requirement, which establishes no management advantage over employees or their unions, is only explicable if we understand such laws as directed mainly to purposes which lie outside the domain of personnel administration.

To show how the particular situation can change the merit or demerit of these requirements, I contrast the statement from the subject report:

Arguments in favor of residency laws have not only stressed their potential contribution to the general municipal economy but also, more particularly, their anticipated economic impact on central city minority groups. Indeed, the implications of residency requirements seem especially important for urban blacks, who generally suffer an unemployment rate twice that of whites. In addition, the greater poverty level among blacks means that they are on the whole more dependent than whites on a healthy public treasury to finance critical services
that upper income groups may purchase from the private sector.

With what I found in Challenging Residency as Job Requirement – The New York Times August 25, 1991

The civil rights advocates contend that residency requirements can lead to racial discrimination, particularly in towns that have few minority residents but are near cities with large minority populations.

“We found that blacks and Hispanics from urban areas were categorically being denied employment in suburban towns because of residency requirements,” said Keith M. Jones, president of the New Jersey chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

He said, for example, that a person who lived in Newark would essentially be barred from municipal employment in nearby Harrison because Harrison residents were given preference for jobs there.

The support for residency requirements is not universal as noted by the following quote from the first paper above:

And a number of California cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, passed such laws in the early 1970s, only to have to erase them from the statute books when California voters barred local residency requirements in a state constitutional initiative in 1974.

This shows that if enough fair minded voters get together, they can overturn an idea that is premissible to enact, but is not wise to enact.

The Real News Network has the story Investigation Reveals Trillions Hidden in Tax Havens.

JAY: Just to get a sense of the scale of this, in The Guardian newspaper’s report about this, they quote a former Mackenzie economist, Mackenzie Group economist that this might be $32 trillion hidden away. I mean, $32 trillion is bigger than, I guess, almost every country’s gross GDP, isn’t it?

BLACK: No. To give you an idea of scope, it is roughly twice the GDP of the United States of America, which by a considerable margin is the largest GDP in the world.

Here is the video from which the above quotes were taken.

Not only are these people evading taxes, but they are also sucking huge amounts of liquidity out of the world economy. What difference does any economic theory make if it does not account for this huge stash of hidden wealth? I mean, $32 trillion is bordering on real serious amounts of money.

The other story out today is that our Marxist, Socialist, Ultra-Liberal President can only find money to balance our budget by taking it out of Granny’s and Grampy’s Social Security. (Yes, that is Sharon and my Social Security). I’ll believe that the retired people’s Social Security and Medicare ought to be tapped after we get the tax fraud down to the size of the U.S. GDP.

I don’t want to earn my living by being a tax fraud, but that seems to be the only government sanctioned way to become wealthy. Perhaps if I were more religious like Mitt Romney, I could get rich by fraud. The trouble is that my atheist morals keep getting in the way.

Willy Sutton has been quoted as explaining why he robbed banks, “Because that’s where the money is.”

The new political/criminal mindset seems to be we don’t rob the banks, “Because they hide their money so well. Better to get it from an easier mark.”

Although the interviewee in this video, William Black, is the author of the book, The Best Way To Rob A Bank Is To Own One. Of course, the banks he was talking about were the ones where you and I keep our money. This is different from the banks where the wealthy hide their money.

The Real News Network has the story Sen. Warren and End of the Minimum Wage Debate.

Regarding Elizabeth Warren’s appearance in this video, putting on my best Ronald Reagan impersonation voice, “There she goes again, trying to introduce facts and data into legislative deliberations.”

No wonder people were so afraid of electing Elizabeth Warren to the Senate. Maybe they suspected that she would forcibly introduce some reality into the Washington Fantasy Land.

I have come into possession of the following proposal for the next Sturbridge Town Meeting:

To see if the Town will vote to amend the General Bylaws, Chapter Eight to add the following new Section entitled Department Head Residency Requirements:

SECTION 8.60 RESIDENCY REQUIREMENT

SECTION 8.61: PURPOSE:

In an effort to enhance the quality of employee performance through greater personal knowledge of and experience with the community’s conditions; and, to develop a greater personal stake in the community’s progress, while reducing the potential for absences and tardiness; and to ensure the ready availability of trained and critical management personnel in emergencies; and to foster the general economic benefits which result from spending ones salary in the employing community, while sharing associated local tax burdens and creating a greater sense of ownership within the community; the Town of Sturbridge hereby establishes the following residency requirements:

Section 8.62: NEWLY APPOINTED DEPARTMENT HEADS:

1. All newly appointed Department Heads (i.e. Post the adoption of this bylaw) as identified in the Town’s Organizational Chart shall establish residency in the Town of Sturbridge within 12 months of the successful conclusion of their 6 month probationary period.
2. Failure to establish such residency within the established time-period shall be deemed to be a resignation from the office held by the Department Head.

SECTION 8.63 DEPARTMENT HEADS APPOINTED PRIOR TO ADOPTION OF THIS BYLAW:

1. All currently serving Department Heads as identified in the Town’s Organizational Chart shall establish residency in Town of Sturbridge within 18 months of the effective date of adoption of this General Bylaw.
2. Failure to establish such residency within the established time-period shall be deemed to be a resignation from the office held by the Department Head.

 

SECTION 8.64 RESIDENCY DEFINED:

 

1. As generally defined and accepted by the Courts, Residency shall be construed to be the actual domicile of the individual where he/she normally east and sleeps and maintains his/her normal personal and household effects.

 

SECTION 8.65: DEPARTMENT HEAD DEFINED

1. For the purpose of this general bylaw a Department Head shall be defined as any one of the following:
   1. Any position currently determined as such on the Town of Sturbridge Organizational Chart under the organizational block of the Board of Selectmen; or
   2. Any position/individual under the organizational block of the Board of Selectmen who is made eligible for year-end merit/incentive bonuses; or
   3. Any future department head positions as may be established from time-totime under the Town of Sturbridge Organizational Chart under the organizational block of the Board of Selectmen or any position/individual made eligible for year-end merit/incentive bonuses under the organizational block of the Board of Selectmen.

SECTION 8.66 TEMPORARY HARDSHIP WAIVERS:

1. The Board of Selectmen may issue Temporary Hardship Waivers when in their judgment a substantial documented hardship exists (e.g. medical issues of a serious nature involving immediate family, clearly defined/documented financial hardship, or other hardships that clearly dictate the need and value of issuing a temporary waivers).
2. Temporary Hardship Waivers will be granted for no more than six months and may be extended for an additional six month period if in the judgment of the Board said extension is in the mutual best interests of both the Department Head and the Town.
3. Temporary Hardship Waivers shall in no case be used as a means of providing anything other than short-term relief from this bylaw when clearly documented circumstances exist that warrant said waiver, and in no case shall waivers be extended beyond a total of 12 months (i.e. two 6-month extensions

 

I understand that the Sturbridge Board of Selectmen will take up this proposal at their next meeting on Tuesday, April 9, at 6:00PM in the Sturbridge Town Hall.  If you are not already incensed at the idea of this proposal, perhaps in the following comments I can convince you to amass at the meeting to oppose the very idea of such a bylaw.

I wonder what gets into the minds of Selectmen and City Councilors that they think that passing laws like this is a good idea and will improve the performance of town or city employees. I won’t try to guess at motivations, but I will try, as calmly as I can, to explain why these types of laws are horrible, inhumane, and bad management techniques.

I think a lot of damage has already been done to the morale of the town employees at the mere proposal of such a bylaw.  The description of the purpose of such a bylaw is an insult and an affront in its wording.  The only way we, as residents, can try to mitigate the damage is to show up en mass to let the town employees know how much we disapprove of this proposal, and that we will not allow such proposals to even make it to Town Meeting to sully the reputation of Sturbridge as a place to live, work, and do business.

I know that there are various theories of management.  During my working career there was Theory X and Theory Y.

From WikiPedia we  have definitions of these theories.

For Theory X, WikiPedia gives the definition:

In this theory, which has been proven counter effective in most modern practice, management assumes employees are inherently lazy and will avoid work if they can and that they inherently dislike work.

For Theory Y, WikiPedia gives the definition:

In this theory, management assumes employees may be ambitious and self-motivated and exercise self-control. It is believed that employees enjoy their mental and physical work duties. According to them work is as natural as play. They possess the ability for creative problem solving, but their talents are underused in most organizations. Given the proper conditions, theory Y managers believe that employees will learn to seek out and accept responsibility and to exercise self-control and self-direction in accomplishing objectives to which they are committed.

To me, the Sturbridge proposal is an example of the theory  that you have to be an A-hole to be an effective manager.  I  don’t know if this has ever been called Theory A.  I, for one, have never aspired to be a Theory A nor a Theory X manager, I never want to aspire to be such a manager, and I never want to have it be thought that I support such management practices even if only in my name.

I would never work under such conditions,  I would not want to foist such conditions on people who would work for me, and I  do not think it should even be legal for an employer to insist on such conditions.

Let’s consider a few circumstances that a human being might find themselves in, that the BOS may not have considered.  This is not meant as a list of items for which they ought to write complex rules and exemptions.  This is just part of an infinite list of considerations that make this law impossible to rescue.

1. What if the spouse of the employee works for another town that has similar residency requirements?  Is it supposed to be easy to decide which one gives up the job or if they need to divorce?
2. What if the spouse has a private sector job that makes it difficult to move?  A doctor may have offices in the residence.  Or the spouse may be a Mayor or some other political office holder that insists on residence to hold the position?
3. What if a child in the family has a long term commitment to the town in which they currently live? Perhaps the child has been in the school system for 9 or so years and has more than 18 months before completion? What if the child is in a special education program for children with special needs?  Does the Town of Sturbridge want to assume the cost and the disruption that changing schools would entail?  Perhaps the current residence has extensive modification for someone, child or adult, with special needs.
4. Is the Town of Sturbridge offering to defray the cost of selling a house, buying a new house, moving the contents of the house, and upgrading the new house for the special needs person?  How could the town be so cruel as to insist on residency and not pay for its rule?
5. Perhaps the worker has to care for a person who cannot be moved and will live longer than the 18 months of waivers provided in this bylaw?  Are we expecting a prospective employee to make life and death decisions to take an offered job?
6. What if the employee lives in a house that has been in his or her family for hundreds of years?  Are they expected to give that up for a job that won’t last nearly that long?
7. Do we want to hire people with such poor qualifications that the only job they can get is one with such inhumane rules?

I just don’t understand how people can think that the Golden Rule says, “Do unto others, as the worst that may have been done to you?”  As a citizen of Sturbridge, do you want the rest of Massachusetts, the country, and the world to think this is the Sturbridge mindset?  If you don’t speak up against this, what are people to think?