Yet They Keep Getting Re-elected
THIS TIME IT’S FROM THE WORLD’S CAPITAL of bungling bureaucrats, Washington, D. C. The D. C. City Council members, who use taxpayer dollars to buy $70,000 SUV’s for themselves to drive around town in, decided that they needed to offset those types of expenditures by furloughing the city’s employees for four days this year. But they forgot to include one important amendment to the law. The Washington Examiner reports:
In December, the D.C. Council approved four furlough days for District employees, leaving them without pay on national holidays to save the city $19 million. Police officers, and fire and rescue workers were exempt, but dispatchers at the 911 call center were required to take the time off. In the weeks before the first furlough day, the union representing the call-takers pleaded with members of the (Mayor) Vincent Gray administration to exempt them, too. Those pleas went unanswered.
When the city administrator ignored their warning, refusing to even respond to their communications, they tried to bring the impending problem to the attention of the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety, but he stiffed them, too.
D. C. Unified Communications Center
So when the first fulough day arrived on February 21-22, the city’s 9-1-1 call takers and dispatchers took their forced leave on the midnight-to-6 am shift. Instead of the usual complement of 16 emergency communications technicians on duty, there were only three in the emergency center (and they were probably supervisors… Ed.). During that night, despite their best desperate efforts to help the innocent victims of fires, heart attacks, and assorted crimes, at least 200 calls for help were never answered.
Last week, before they drove away in their custom Lincoln Navigators, the city council modified their furlough legislation to permit the communications clerks to spread out their furlough days over a lengthier period of time.
One of Councilman Kwame Brown’s two brand-new Navigators
(Examiner photo)
The Examiner has the STORY.
