Mayor De Blasio Agrees To Raises For City Council Members - People Are Pissed

Lots of people are upset over Mayor DiBlasio's accepting a recommendation from an independent panel to give 23% raises for members of NYC City Council. This raise would bring their salary up to $138k from $112k.

In exchange for the raises, the City Council members will no longer be able to hold jobs outside city council.

In a news story that I watched on CBS this morning, the react quotes were from two people:

1. An NYC citizen who felt the council members are do-nothings who probably don't deserve a paycheck in the first place
2. The president of the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association (the nyc police union) who said that this raise is a slap in the face of police officers who, by comparison, received paltry 1% raises.

After reading the comments in the online version of the CBS story I watched this morning, which essentially echoed the citizen and the PBA president (but in much more angry terms), I felt like I should quickly write down my thoughts.

Here they are:

1. It seems like the people who gave the react quotes and the comment section people completely missed the fact that these raises come with bans on outside employment.

The raise is an acknowledgment of new regulations that would be placed on city council members that would effectively lower their income earning ability.

The $50k/yr (or higher...or lower) consulting gig that they used to work is now replaced with a $25k raise. That's significant.


The public benefits because, in theory, there will be fewer opportunities for conflicts of interest. To me, this sounds like a reasonable compromise. But to those who cannot get past the announcement of the pay raise, this sounds like civil servants enriching themselves at the taxpayers' expense. Why are people only capable of seeing one side of the story?

2. It seems like people are bad at math

Why can't people do math? Why can't PBA president see that there's a huge difference between giving $25k raises to the 51 members of city council (+ a few other elected officials like the mayor, comptroller and DA) and giving a raise to New York City's 50,000 police officers? I'm not saying the cops don't deserve a raise, but we're talking a 3 orders of magnitude difference in the number of people affected.

Quick Math Aside: If 50k cops get an average raise of $500 in one year - that will cost taxpayers $25 million. $25k raises for 51 people will cost $1.3 million. 

If the argument isn't about money, but rather fairness and principle - we have to take into consideration the fact that police officers are allowed to work outside jobs (e.g. bouncers, bodyguards) while carrying their department-issued service weapons. This legislation takes away from council members the opportunity to be employed outside of their city job. So there's that.


In closing, the reactions I saw serve as another illustration of why I hate people (read my post on hating people here). People generally do not think critically about things and they often express their poorly informed opinions as though there aren't any circumstances under which they could be wrong. (Aside: with that said - there is a good chance that this raise could just be bad policy. Why hasn't the baseline expectation for NYC's elected officials *always* been "no outside employment"? Why does correcting a wrong, assuming it is wrong, require a raise?)

In the defense of the people who gave react quotes in the televised CBS NY story, there is a chance that the reporter baited them into giving nasty react quotes by omitting the information about restrictions on outside work (juicer quotes = juicier story). But even if that's the case, the people in the comment section have no excuse. The full story was presented plainly online - the article headline reads: "DeBlasio Agrees To Raises For City Council Members In Exchange For Reforms"

i'm done.

Jaded

I watched a guy I don't know sell heroin to a guy that I know this past saturday. I then watched the guy I know use the drug.

Kinda messed me up...because there had always been a veil between the knowledge of drug abuse and witnessing drug abuse.

The dealer was on a bicycle and he was selling his product in a rather ostentatious manner...so much so that I felt like justice needed to be carried out. So I called 911.

At a certain point in the conversation I told the dispatcher "oh, nevermind...there's a cop right here. I'll talk to him".

I discreetly engaged the cop and told him what the guy on the bike was doing. The cop then responded "what do you want me to do? Search him so everyone can get mad at me...for me to only find nothing?"

Justice was all I wanted.

The backstory is that police have been catching a lot of heat for their new "stop and frisk" policy. Which has a 93% failure rate.

My prayer has been that the police would not become discouraged or jaded. Lord please help this man.

Respect

I was thinking the other day that men need to be intentional about respecting women and encouraging  other men and boys to do the same.

My girl (futurewife) was telling me a crazy story last night that really messed me up. She had some friends visiting from philly. They dragged her out to times square late Saturday night. While out there some men started to harass them - one of them even started to caress the hair of one of the girls (completely unwelcome contact). My girl was able to step in and stop a bad situation from getting worse, but what I found most troubling was the hearts of the men. What makes dudes think that they can treat women so disrepectfully?

Part of me is like "if I punch dude in the face, he'll learn" but nothing could be further from the truth and nothing could bring me closer to getting stabbed on the street :l

Me? I'm just going to pray. I'm going to pray for the city and I'm going to pray for vision to see different things that I can do as well as for vision to see the things that I can encourage others to do. Things are so out of control. But God is sooo in control :o)

Car Accident

There was a huge blizzard in NYC last weekend. The department of sanitation was poorly prepared to handle the weather.

In the first hours of the blizzard, while driving home from church, I hit an ice patch on a street that had not been salted and ultimately skid into a parked car.

I did some damage to the body and I also knocked off the sideview mirror of the parked car.

I believe that the Lord used this experience to humble me. I consider myself a really good driver with a superior driving sense. I am definitely part of the 70% of drivers that count themselves in the top 10% of drivers. As a result of this, i'm often impatient with other drivers. I find myself growing frustrated when i'm stuck in traffic that is the result of accident rather than praying for safety and recovery.

I think this experience really helped me to be more compassionate and i think that it will ultimately help to make me a safer driver.

I *just* put my car in the shop. The cost to repair my body damage is less than my deductible. The person whose car i hit *just* called me and we agreed that i would pay for a replacement sideview mirror - which shouldn't cost more than $250.

Prayerfully, this transfer of money will go well. I'm considering writing up (i AM going to write up) an agreement in case she tries some shady stuff that has to be dealt with in court.