City Council is outrageous

One month after the election our City Council suddenly proposes adding over $500,000 to their budget (“City Council seeks to boost its own office with several hires,” Dec. 12). Voters should have been made aware of the proposal well ahead of November’s election. The fact that they were not indicates members believe it would be so unpopular that it would have affected the election results., and they are correct.

This boondoggle will increase the cost of an already bloated Council budget to well over $2 million. One of the new hires is for a full-time spokesman with a salary of $120,000 per year. Do we really need to pay someone almost three times the median Spokane salary to just tell us what the council is up to when we can read about it the next day in the paper? President-elect Beggs thinks so with the comment, “The public really wants to know what we’re up to sooner.”

It also adds $10,000 to each member’s travel allowance without bothering to let us know what the current allowance is. So one month AFTER the election the council arbitrarily increases it’s budget by about a third to simply reduce the workload they were elected to perform. Seriously?

Hal Dixon

Spokane