Letters to the editor - January 22, 2015

Per capita taxation is the fairest way

I write this letter to address one of several troubling efforts of the Region One School District’s superintendent to re-engineer the executive structure of the region and local districts’ operations.

 In the instance at hand, the superintendent seeks to discontinue basing the assessments for her pay on student enrollment. Instead, she advocates dividing her pay costs evenly among the region’s seven schools, independent of their different sizes or their different instructional particularities.

Her rationale for this scheme is that the descriptive duties of her superintendence are the same for all schools.

This brings to mind personal experience. In an employment, I was the chief pilot and director of operations of a small company’s flight department. A friend of mine held the same position for a large international airline. The difference was that he was paid at least 10 times more than I was. Since the descriptive duties were the same for both of us, why the difference in pay?

Until now, I would have thought the answer was obvious. Like anyone in a principal leadership or management position, we were not paid to accomplish the subsidiary tasks of our positions. We were recruited and compensated in accordance with the scale and complexity of our responsibilities. It is not that subsidiary tasks were or are immaterial; the doing of them was and should have been taken for granted as a precondition for our being entrusted with our respective responsibilities.

I cannot say whether or not the above is business school doctrine, but it has always been axiomatically understood at every place I have ever worked where I was either a boss or reported to a superior.

The current arrangement for the shared cost of the employment of the school superintendent is tied to the enrollments of the respective seven schools. It is, in effect, per capita taxation and is, over time and as a practical matter, one of the fairest, most efficient ways to pay for or distribute resources. This is why we find it in effect in almost every public or private arena where services are received by or provided to groups of people.

Ordinarily, I would expect the aggregate executive responsibilities of the superintendent, the most senior and highest paid employee of the school district, to be the basis for her salary. I find it sad and disappointing, however, that a school superintendent has such a diminished perspective of her job that compensation for it is viewed as a kind of piecework pay for a laundry list of taskings. 

Louis G. Timolat

Town of Canaan 

(aka Falls Village)

The wrong process?

You’d have to look far and wide to find a Salisbury resident who isn’t supportive of building affordable housing in Salisbury. The town’s leaders have spoken in unison supporting the current proposed affordable/workforce housing at the northeast end of Railroad Street. Everyone has applauded Jim Dresser’s generous gift of land east of the Rail Trail. And the town is extremely fortunate to have the Women’s Institute for Housing and Economic Development making the presentation.

That said, the proposal for 30-32 units on the Dresser property is offering an impossibly dense design. Because of the requirement to propose a large number of housing units in order to attract grant funds, the Women’s Institute has created a project which is out-of-scale with the adjacent housing.

Town residents will not be allowed to express their collective opinion of the project directly, because the current proposal is simply a “rough draft” necessary to give a general sense of the idea. The residents must first vote to give the project a viable access using a section of the Rail Trail. Only after this approval is given will the town residents be shown the “revised” project architecture and its site planning. The Women’s Institute has said that the high density is required for the project to remain financially viable. So the townspeople are being asked to set a precedent using the Rail Trail for its road system before seeing a revised design.

Meanwhile the townspeople have not had the opportunity to explore the proposed purchase of land from the Pope Estate. Shouldn’t the possibility of building appropriately scaled affordable houses on the Pope land be discussed prior to taking action on the Dresser land?

To not do so is a flawed process.

David Elwell

Salisbury

Won’t this limit the press?

The president of the United States makes a statement that he will restrict First Amendment Rights of the press, and I cannot hear the response from the press because of the crickets.

“President Barack Obama has a moral responsibility to push back on the nation’s journalism community when it is planning to publish anti-jihadi articles that might cause a jihadi attack against the nation’s defense forces,” the White House’s press secretary said Jan. 12. “The president … will not now be shy about expressing a view or taking the steps that are necessary to try to advocate for the safety and security of our men and women in uniform whenever journalists’ work may provoke jihadist attacks,” spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters at the White House’s daily briefing.

Fascinating.

Paul Bartomioli

West Cornwall