There's a new sheriff in town (and she thinks computers are useful)

Subhead: Do a great job as a city council member and you, too, may work your way up to a council person's assistant

Dallas Morning News Dallas City Hall reporter Rudolph Bush has a story in today's paper about the NIMBY City Council's reluctance to trim their own budgets even though all other General Fund-supported city departments, save police, are having their budgets slashed so that the the city can balance an overall budget that is (at last count) still $38 million short. I found this paragraph in his story somewhat astonishing:

"Running each council member's office costs taxpayers an average of $182,000 a year, a figure that includes the member's $37,500 salary, $125,000 for an assistant and a secretary, $16,400 for office expenses such as mailings and $4,000 for travel."

Wait a minute! Back to the salary part of that. The council member gets $37,500; an assistant and a secretary get $125,000? Translated, that means if a city council person's secretary earns a salary of, say, $50,000 a year, which seems to be a damn good salary for a secretary today, then the assistant earns twice as much as the city council person.

Am I alone here in thinking something is out of whack with that?

But back to the point I was driving at in the main headline of this post. Later in his story, Mr. Bush wrote that city council members Angela Hunt and Ann Margolin "have discussed other cuts that could have a long-term impact. Among them is elimination of the thick packets of printed material council members receive before meetings. Printing that material costs taxpayers about $148,000 a year.

'Most of us don't need most of what's in it. It seems to me we ought to be able to function primarily online,' Margolin said."

Truth be told, the city has had the capability and the desire to put this material strictly on-line for six or seven years now. The reason this was never done was simply because of Ms. Margolin's predecessor, Mitchell Rasansky, who absolutely refused to have anything to do with computers. He didn't even have one in his council office. He demanded that massive paper versions of the council material.