Posted on 04/21/2003 7:06:31 AM PDT by blau993
Edited on 07/12/2004 3:40:19 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
The District has many more city workers earning $100,000 salaries than the much-larger city of Chicago, and 10 times more than Baltimore, a city with a comparable population, The Washington Times has learned.
With its 572,000 residents, the District has 156 more city workers above $100,000 than Chicago, which has almost 3 million people. Baltimore has a population of 651,000.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
The bulging payroll is another legacy of the Marion Barry years that Mayor Williams has done nothing to rectify. His typical response, seen in this article, is either to deny a problem exists or to claim he has no power to fix it.
Congress and the Administration have bigger agendas, and there is no incentive for them to spend the energy and political capital to clean up the mess that is the District Government. The amount of money wasted is not so great in the grand scheme of things. They know that they will be branded as racists if they mess with Home Rule, so the easy answer is "why bother".
The "local" congresscritters from Maryland and DC occasionally get interested, because their constituents who work in the District have to put up with the hassles resulting from its incompetent government. However, they too have other agendas, and they largely content themselves with putting out the brush fires and hoping it doesn't evolve into something bitter.
You are right. I was in DC during the big snowstorm seven years ago. Crack-pipe Marion was on TV promising everyone the streets would be plowed in two days. Of course, all the private snowplow operators, having been stiffed by Washington after the last storm, gave Barry the finger, or at least demanded payment up front.
The major streets were mostly unplowed even ten days later, and many of the side streets were never plowed at all. I hear something similar happened in the big storm this year.
This is what happens when you have a one-party racial spoils system. Imagine the screams of racism that would be directed at anyone trying to reform DC government by canning some of these useless lumps earning more than 100k per year.
-cm
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