Unreal. Unreal. While the rest of the town tightens its belt, the staff and employees aren’t going to get hurt a bit. And in many cases, we’re not even talking belt tightening…..we’re talking one next door neighbor really hurting to provide a town employee living next door with a raise and a full package of benefits.

Unreal. People should be down demonstrating in front of town hall. You know, at some point, government and its employees should recognize that they are our employees >>> we are not theirs, nor do we have any obligation to shelter them from any and all reprecussions of a declining economy.

What is going on?

But I love the Me & Ollie’s-type cafe idea for across from the post office, and maybe they could sell newspapers too!

By the way, if I am thinking of the same house you all are, here is some history trivia: It seems to have been owned in the 1800s by our then-Congressman, John N. Goodwin. During the Civil War, Lincoln appointed him the first territorial governor of Arizona. His house is preserved in Prescott, AZ today, and when you walk in, he is introduced as “a native of South Berwick, Maine.” There is even a Goodwin Street. The cabin and museum are a big attraction and contribute to the vitality of downtown Prescott. Wouldn’t it be cool if a cafe in his South Berwick house contributed to revitalization here as well?

there is that property for sale across from the post office. It has parking in the back and is commercially zoned. Redo the first floor — break thru walls to create large open space. Reface the front with large glass windows. It would be a perfect coffee cafe. If I were on the town development committee, I would approach coffee cafe operators — and I don’t mean Starbucks. I mean the guys in portsmouth, ollies, and carpe diem, and there are several others of that size. We could offer tax breaks to them for the first couple of years. Possibly a grant on the renovation (that way we have some hand in the design and signage).

It would be a win, win, win. Town gets a tax revenue. Teens get jobs. Parents get a place for a nice cup of coffee in the morning or pre-afternoon pick up. the other merchants benefit from increased foot traffic. South Berwick gets a heartbeat.

Finally, there’s one thing about these raises and how they are being defended which is truly not business-like or logical. Let’s look at the clerk’s job as an example. Its a function which getting completed is worth say 27K. Now the people doing this job maybe truly lovely and he/she may do the job quite well. But bottomline, the market worth of the job and the value of getting it done is worth somewhere around 27K. And there are plenty of people around now willing to do the job for 27K. But….we have to hand out raises.

What everyone trying to defend these raises seems to be saying is that these people doing these jobs should get more because people elsewhere doing a similar job get paid more. They think — the numbers that everyone is throwing around saying we need to be comparable to were supplied by an organization dedicated to serving the interests of municipal employees. No one, it seems, has done any independent research. Nor does anyone seem to be focusing on what it is worth to the Town to get this job done.

Whatever. All of this is like saying… milk is selling for three bucks in my town, and that’s about where it should be, at least for me… I like milk, I’m not insane about it but I like it alot…three bucks is about what its worth to me…..but, everyone is saying its five bucksin towns about fifty miles away, so i’m going to give the local store five bucks for the milk, cause they are lovely people.

This is illogical. Its also going to be something we regret deeply this time next year. As far as the “doom and gloom” goes, listen, we’ve got a media that is not going to report what’s really happening with the economy because that causes ratings to go down (no joke….CNBC lost over half its viewers in the last bear market). If you want to know what’s happening, truly, in our economy, you can go read the Brit papers online. They aren’t as concerned about sparing their readers’ feelings. In fact, they take the rather novel approach of addressing their readers as adults with reading ability above the sixth grade level, and of average intelligence.