December 14, 2011
Fiscal irresponsibility takes its “toll”
A spot-on rant from Jason Mattera:
Ladies and gentlemen, meet Princesella Smith, who raked in $89,599 for operating the toll lanes at the George Washington Bridge in 2011.
Good work if you can get it!
Smith isn’t alone. An investigation by the New York Post revealed that another toll booth operator pulled in a whopping $102,670 in 2011, $40K of that money coming in overtime. In total, as the Post notes, there are at least 24 New York and New Jersey workers who have raked in more than $80,000 as “public” workers at a job that requires us to hand them even more of our money.
Yep, in essence, we’re paying them to sit in an outside cubicle all day and deplete our wallets further if we want to travel between New York, New Jersey and the surrounding states.
Must be nice.
I can’t say as I would blame the employees themselves for any of this, I mean who wouldn’t take the hours and the pay involved? I would, however, blame the supervisory personnel and the bureaucrats who make all this possible.
What a country! 
Besides excessive wages to people whose only skill requirement is to sit on a stool and count and collect dollar bills, tax dollars reserved for transportation uses have gone to a panoply of nonessential programs. As Ronald Utt of The Heritage Foundation points out, the “highway trust fund” has been raided to pay for Indian reservations, historic preservation sites, Appalachian and Mississippi Delta development, roadside beautification, bicycles, hiking paths, university research, and—the granddaddy of all expenses—feeding the $425 million beast that is the Department of Transportation.
The Port Authority (PA), for instance, employees a gardener for $94,000 and a blacksmith for $146,000 a year. Heck, there are even retired PA employees who are making around that amount by cashing in on unused vacation and comp time. (Here’s an idea: As we’re facing budget deficits well into our future, how about requiring public employees to use their vaca time … or lose it. No cashing in allowed.)
I concur.
http://hardastarboard.mu.nu/wp-trackback.php?p=1800
December 27th, 2011 at 12:45 pm
I’ve been in the wrong career all my life obviously. I never earned anything comparable in a job where I could have destroyed half a city or a major part of the economoic life of it anyway by a simple wrong decision …
December 28th, 2011 at 9:17 am
Gray Monk
This is what happens when unions dominate so-called “critical infrastructure”. In New York, pretty much every government function beneath those of electees and their appointees is unionized, whether there is any real skill involved or not.
You can bet that the unions to which some of these overpaid, underworked employees belong will, whenever they decide they want an excuse to increase member dues and a contract is up for renewal, cry that some poor, hard done to toll booth or other “worker” whose income the previous year broke $100,000 is not earning enough to keep up with the cost of living and doesn’t have sufficient benefits, and demand, under threat of a walkout, across the board increases.
Of course, the taxpayers shouldering the expense will largely be citizens barely grossing $50,000 per year with a paucity of benefits.
It’s criminal.