September 22, 2008
What's the Utica school superintendent hiding?
Utica City School Superintendent Marilyn Skermont refuses to make public the terms of a proposed teacher contract--until after the school board ratifies it Tuesday.
Meanwhile, 845 Utica teachers received a copy of their proposed union contract on the first day of school. A week ago, they ratified it by a 648-121 vote. Nevertheless, Skermont won't let the public see the contract until its too late to have any input.
One board member, Albert Altieri, told the Utica Observer-Dispatch that taxpayers should not be allowed to review the contract until the Board of Education votes on it--eight days after the union vote.
"It hasn't been fully negotiated or settled," Alteri said. "...If it's released, the O-D [Observer Dispatch] could write an editorial on what is right or wrong with the contract and influence board members' votes."
The newspaper responded with an editorial, one of two on the topic in three days (here and here).
We don't quite understand that logic, but believe that the public has a right to know exactly what their representatives will be voting on and what that might cost them.
There is no good reason--legal or otherwise--to keep this secret. The contract has been approved by the teachers and is beyond the negotiation stage. Providing the public with details would not affect that, and hiding them only stirs distrust in leadership.
Recommended reading: The Sunday New York Times story about "the disability epidemic" among retirees of the Long Island Rail Road.
Virtually every career employee--as many as 97 percent in one recent year--applies for and gets disability payments soon after retirement, a computer analysis of federal records by The New York Times has found. Since 2000, those records show, about a quarter of a billion dollars in federal disability money has gone to former L.I.R.R. employees, including about 2,000 who retired during that time.
The L.I.R.R.'s disability rate suggests it is one of the nation's most dangerous places to work. Yet in four of the last five years, the railroad has won national awards for improving worker safety.
Update: Governor David Paterson is asking Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to investigate the disability pension payments (here, here and here).
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