Our current mayor and his handpicked staff are being paid somewhere between $60 to $75 per hour with full benefits and no experience required. Maybe we need to revisit and revise their pay scales to correspond with the wages being offered for the street maintenance department.
The stated response from our mayor’s office and staff to a personnel shortfall of 20% affecting the road maintenance department that they have known about since at least September has been “to aggressively recruit, retain and bring people on board.” They say they have been very “results-oriented in getting more guys into the seats” by offering starting wages of $21.23 with no benefits while failing to order replacement parts for the 24% of the department’s snow removal equipment sitting idle — and still awaiting the unordered parts while hoping it doesn’t snow?
This all-out “effort” from the mayor’s office has produced no new local employees, no repaired equipment and five or six subcontracted graders with operators that most likely cost more than city-owned equipment and offering wages of $21.23 per hour into a “nationwide CDL shortage” is not going to fare any better than offering those wages locally.
The “adjustment in plowing logistics” offered by the mayor’s staff is misleading at best and a lie at worst. Single graders only clear half the street faster than running in pairs. The second grader still has to come back sometime to finish the job. Take a look at most of the so-called “plowed streets” the Bronson administration is touting — multilane streets like Lake Otis are one- to 1.5-lane-wide roads in each direction at best, and residential roads are maybe 1.5 lanes wide in both directions. I invite the mayor to please take a drive around town and see for himself.
Mayor Dave Bronson should quit blaming everyone else for his self-inflicted problems. Staying united and working together is a catchy phrase that doesn’t mean squat if you don’t uphold your end of the bargain. Snow removal services are a core issue that is paid for by our property taxes — the rest is up to Bronson and his administration.
— William Jarrett
Anchorage
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