McLin, Williams, Whaley want to have it both ways.

In the Dayton Daily News article of the day about the pay raise for top management controversy “City leaders respond to pay raises” all of a sudden, “the team” – who’ve been touting non-stop their illegal “monthly financial meetings” ^[1] are now saying it’s all the City Manager’s fault with this pay bump for top management.

Just yesterday at the Baptist ministers’ event ^[2], Rhine McLin was bragging how she did the job full time. Today, the $300K in raises “fell under the authority of the City Manager”- and quotes her as saying “with the city manager form of government there are things that are not in our purview- I’m confident, overall, pay among union and nonunion (employees) is equitable and has been professionally manged.”

Yet, 17 people making over $100k, including the City Manager were handed a “step” increase while asking people to take unpaid days off.

What’s more, the commission’s superstar former city manager says “I approved the process we had used historically” from his new job in Greensboro, NC. Anytime you hear past processes as the best justification for current practices you know you have a loser as a leader. He even broke his own pay guidelines for these “premium positions” who are only supposed to get merit increases.

Joey Williams still thinks, after eight years, that “There are ways to look at things we do and make them better” without a record of introducing anything substantively innovative in his tenure. He then goes on to say that they “aren’t passing the buck” which is exactly what they are doing.

If not for Nan Whaley’s penchant for butchering the English language (in one video ^[3] she talks about problems expounding and expounding as if they suddenly could talk) I would chalk this quote up to the DDN making a typo- but it’s too funny: “the city manager’s job is not only to settle union contracts, it’s also his job to make sure there is parody.” So we can blame him for her last four years of her as a commissioner.

The sad fact is, we’re still suffering from a failure of leadership- instead of proactively working to get our budget and finances in line- we’re dealing with retroactive issues like this. Facing a budget crunch there should have been zero pay raises for anyone (contracted or not) if we are indeed looking at layoffs or unpaid furlough days.

This issue is pretty simple- start acting like a city that has a budget deficit. Revert everyone’s pay back to old levels, the commission takes at least a 5% pay cut, stop handing out taxpayer money to private corporations (they are approving $125K today to two businesses ^[4]) and start coming up with some innovative ways to deliver services cheaper (moving parking meter enforcement to electric Segways instead of cars that eat gas would be a start for instance).

We’ve seen eight years of McLin and Williams and four of Whaley. I’m still waiting for one sign that things have changed in city hall- are you done waiting? Come pick up a yard sign asap.