Shari Greeen is the biggest spender of the Councillors by a long shot. Need to watch if she is the biggest spender on Council as well.

It is not a question of who may be the biggest spender but what value is accrued from the spending.
For example we spend BIG on wages and benefits for city employees and adminstration but the return we usually get is frustration, bureaucratic BS and an ongoing process with no end in sight. This is NOT the best use of our dollars.

Get rid of staff who are always putting up barriers (to maintain their jobs and pensions) and put the money towards tangible results, ie re-paved roadways, replaning of trees (improve air quality) and better street lighting (improve sense of security).

I recommend at least a 10% personnel cut, wage and benefit freeze and having employees document their productivity on a monthly basis. This would streamline and hopefully get quicker, faster and more decisive action from the occupants of City Hall, all Civic Facilities and the works yards.

Then we can implement some real upgrades to our city for the benefit of all citizens and not just maintaining the status quo of unsubstantiated high income levels and padded pensions of the city bureaucracy. We want a "sustainable" community, then deal with the "unsustainable" nature of the City's 'fixed costs" the greatest being labour.

Wow! All that dough spent just to be "king" of a gritty little mill town. Don't worry. It's tax deductible. As for Eugene's $27 bucks, well, that goes without saying, if he can run for council on the cheap, well never mind. You figure it out. I hope he had a campaign manager to help him decide how to spend the $27 bucks. I know I would.

The financila report for the City for 2007, which is the latest one I could find on the city site shows a total expenditure of $175,939,352. Of that $42,835,118 was for staff and $316,185 was for Council.

The amount for goods and services was #127,202,441, with the remainder going to grants.

A 10% saving on staff, which includes staff for all of the services provided by the City directly though its employees rahter than contracts would provide just over $4.2 million.

If we assume that less work would then be done, some, all, or more would simply be added to the contract work which would generate more private sector work. There are absolutely no guarantess that the work paid for will be less expensive.

If personnel have to "document their productivity on a monthly basis", on whose time are they to do that? Allowing half an hour each day for productivity recording would total about 10 hours each month. Adjust it for any allowed period you like, but for it to be of any use at all means it would take some time to record.

Then couple that with an increased workload from the same work that will still be expected to be done with the 10% less staff, and watch the potholes increase in number exponentially.

All this to be done with frozen wages and benefits. What a fantastic incentive for promoting increased productivity.

Finally, hire a management type to take all those productivity reports and put them into a computer database for a statistical analysis, as data has to be evaluated to be of any use at all. Otherwise it just becomes a useless and point;ess waste of time and money.

$4.2 million per year would go a long way to re-paving our streets and create other tangible benefits.

Otter Properties donated $8,250 spread over 7 candidates. it almost sounds like Backlin or Majors eh what.

Brings up some things to think about though:

We can see who the common major sponsors are and what sector they come from.

We can see it is prohibitively expensive for the average person to get elected on their own dime, without outside sponsorship.

What is the value to a sponsor, to have a particular candidate elected over the next one ?

The people who complain about corruption in government are the same people who think city workers should document their productivity every day.

Tell me how you see the big picture when you are looking through a microscope ?

Then tell me how you stop corruption in government when the army sent to stop it is made up of morons.

An ancient Roman saying was that 'a free man who walks through the door of a dictator, becomes a slave to that dictator'. Caesar spoke of it when avoiding Sulla the dictator as a youth. It was a word of warning, and I think it applies to campaign donations in modern politics.

I think there should be other ways of running elections, than special interest financing. If contributions are accepted they should be small ($100 max) and only from individual citizens. Media (especially TV and radio) should be compelled to provide free and equal coverage for debate of issues and not be allow the influence of commercial marketing (newspapers only for that kind of stuff).

Tax credits could be issued at a flat rate for air time spent on election issues, so that big and small media is feed from an unbiased source.

Personally I myself and many other self respecting people would find it very hard to participate in politics when it involves going on one bended knee to all those looking for sole issue influence. It goes against the values of representing the constituency as a whole based on independent fact and not political considerations.

Money corrupts absolutely... and nobody can compete in politics and its related industry otherwise is the root of todays problems.

It is easy to see why we have the fiscal folly's in City hall. The candidates were all inconsistent in their spending and in their accounting of income and expenditures. Some had an exact accounting to the penny with a zero balance, and others had positive balance sheets. I guess creative bookkeeping is the norm in politics.

I would be happy to donate $30 to Fetterly just to put him on more even footing with the rest of them. No agenda, just to throw the under dog a bone.