For those who may have missed them the first time or to reintroduce them to those who saw them previously, I offer some of my more important letters I wrote to the editors of the Whitehall News.

This one, a year before I ran for office and five years after beginning my fight, is from January 2014. It was entitled;

‘City leader’s salaries separate them from low-wage hoi polloi‘

To the Editor,

Mayor Kim Maggard says the city needs (financially) to be as competitive as possible to keep a high-quality staff and yet filled those positions without competition, placing friends or those already at City Hall in jobs, some of whom didn’t even meet the criteria or could be considered as most qualified.

Councilman Wes Kantor, in nodding agreement with the mayor’s beliefs, and Councilman Robert Bailey, making justifications for pay raises he sees as competitive, rubber-stamped approval for the mayor’s selections despite her lack of a competitive search. She ignored the best we could afford in favor of cronyism and patronage. All of those agreed to and passed by the people’s watchdogs, our council, with Bailey and Kantor smoothing her way.

According to statistics of income in Whitehall at City-Data.com, our Development Director will earn 77%  more than what Whitehall’s average wage-earners take in.

The IT director, mayor, auditor, city attorney, human resources director and service director’s salaries will be higher than 87% of our wage earners. Even the code enforcement officer is paid more than 70% of what wage earners living in Whitehall make. This puts them in the echelon with Whitehall’s top third wealthiest residents. This in a city where a full two-thirds of residents make less than $60,000 a year, with three-fourths of those making less than $30,000. These raises are not in correlation to what residents receive in the private sector nor is a true reflection of the residents income level.

This inequity is why I strenuously disagree with Bailey’s assertion that salary increases are not extravagant. With this kind of self-serving political avarice, it seems the reason some at City Hall build tax revenue is not so residents can enjoy a higher quality of life but rather to build that for themselves–that which removes them from the reality in which the majority of residents they serve live.

Gerald Dixon