Tag Archives: Contract

The Key To Fixing Anything Is Individual Action

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This is the type of letter we should all be writing:

July 30, 2020

Supervisor Joseph S. Saladino

54 Audrey Avenue

Oyster Bay, NY 11771

Subject:  Town of Oyster Bay Ice Skating Center at Bethpage

Dear Supervisor Saladino,

I am a longtime Town of Oyster Bay resident. I am the mother of two youth hockey players, a youth hockey coach and a hockey player. I would like to bring to your attention what I, as a taxpayer and longtime resident of the Town of Oyster Bay, consider a significant problem.

For approximately the past seven years, the Town of Oyster Bay has contracted the skating school at the Bethpage facility to The Rinx. I have personally observed they control approximately 60 plus hours of ice a week. I have heard from multiple sources that The Rinx pays approximately $10,000 a month for this ice. It is my understanding that the town receives zero percentage of The Rinx revenues; this is a flat fee. While these numbers may not be exact, I believe the difference to be immaterial with these numbers easily discoverable via the Freedom of Information Act.

Based on these numbers, The Rinx pays a little under $40 per hour of ice. It’s even less when you consider The Rinx has dedicated office space in the Town of Oyster Bay Skating Center at Bethpage, the building maintenance staff at its disposal, and free advertising as The Rinx programs often appear on town flyers and utilize wall space for promotional materials. I do not believe The Rinx as a corporate entity pays into the town’s tax base nor are the majority of its clients residents. This seven year relationship yields little or no benefit to your constituents even those that are members of the hockey community.

I, as a resident, can purchase ice for $300 an hour. There is very limited prime time ice available because it is monopolized by The Rinx. I am limited in what I can do with this ice because of restrictions placed as a result of this contract with The Rinx. The town would have to sell eight hours of prime time ice a week to break even with this contract. The ROI on this contract that was not only initially signed but also renewed after being evaluated by a consultant is ugly. It is either indicative of a complete lack of business intelligence or a signifier of graft that plagued the prior administration.

Supervisor Saladino, I believe you to be a man of integrity, working hard to uphold your promise to create transparency and root out corruption, and making sound fiscal decisions for the Town of Oyster Bay. On that basis alone, I have to believe you are not aware of how grossly lopsided this contract is. And if the town of Oyster Bay does not benefit, then most likely someone in your administration, (and likely held over from the prior administration), is benefiting personally at the detriment to your constituents.

I implore you to investigate this immediately so that the residents can benefit from having such a beautiful facility. As a taxpayer, I do not feel I should be forced to subsidize someone’s private business, and the people that established this precedent should be rooted out of your administration as well. Our economy is facing difficult times ahead and you cannot afford to carry anyone that puts their own self interests over that of the constituents they are supposed to serve.

Thank you for your time and attention to this matter. Please contact me if you would like to discuss this further.

Sincerely yours,

 

It will be interesting to see if this letter gets a response.

When The Media Breaks The Law

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Yesterday Ed Morrissey posted an article at Hot Air about the latest chapter in the saga of Nick Sandmann and the settlements reached with CNN and The Washington Post.

The article notes:

The first rule of Settlement Club is that you don’t talk about Settlement Club. And the second rule of Settlement Club — ah, heck, the first fifty rules of Settlement Club is that you don’t talk about settlements in lawsuits with mutual gag rules in place. Apparently that didn’t sink in at CNN or the Washington Post after both media outlets decided to quietly end the litigation brought by Nicholas Sandmann. Their employees went on social media attempting to spin the settlement and suggest that Sandmann only got a minimal payment to shut him up.

Big mistake, Sandmann attorney Lin Wood made clear almost immediately. “I know how to deal with liars,” Wood tweeted, and warned that new lawsuits would be filed unless “heads rolled” at both outlets:

…This started with speculation that Sandmann had indeed gotten paid nothing more than “nuisance value.” Law & Crime wrote a pretty comprehensive overview of the social-media discussion of that premise after some attorneys unconnected to the case tried to read the tea leaves from various announcements in both cases. It’s worth reading, at least for the legal theories behind the speculation. That included a rather anodyne statement from Wood expressing his opinion that the speculation was “uninformed, errant nonsense,” but added that “questions about confidentiality and the timing of the settlement will have to be directed to others.” Wood didn’t threaten anyone over the speculation — because they were not party to the confidentiality agreement, and neither was Law & Crime.

That isn’t the case with Stelter, Rangappa, and Zak. They work for the respondents in these lawsuits and act as their agents. As soon as they published and expanded on the speculation, they characterized the settlement in terms their employer specifically agreed not to do. Not only does that open up new avenues for Sandmann against the Post and CNN, it might allow Wood to add the three as respondents in a new libel/defamation action.

This may seem like a minor thing, but it is important that both parties act in accordance with the agreement they signed. I can understand why CNN and The Washington Post would want people to think that the settlement was small–they want to discourage future lawsuits. I can understand why Lin Wood would want to give the impression of a large settlement–it might discourage future character assassination of innocent people by the media.

Stay tuned. There may be more coming.

Three Things We Are Being Told That Are Simply Wrong

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On Friday, Heritage Action posted an article titled, “Three False Charges Against America’s Police Officers.”

This is the article:

Many of the events following George Floyd’s death have only perpetuated injustice and led to violence and crime. Thousands of rioters across the country have destroyed private property, looted businesses, attacked police officers, and have even taken the lives of innocent Americans.

Amidst the lawlessness, some on the left are using George Floyd’s death as an opportunity to push for extreme leftist agendas. Many of these agendas distort the truth about the role and efficacy of our nation’s police departments and propose radical “reform” measures that could potentially contribute to more crime and chaos in our country. These radical proposals from the left are based on lies and must be countered with truth.

Here are some of the fictitious claims liberals make against police officers… and the facts to counter them.

FICTION: “American police departments are systemically racist.”

FACT: Allegations of systemic racism are false and harmful.

While it is important to address grievances caused by the nation’s police departments, broad, all-encompassing accusations of racism completely disregard years of intentional training, diversification, and reform in police departments. Police are deployed based upon the location of crime, calls for service, and other data much of which is centered in minority communities. Additionally, research suggests that officers take longer to discharge their weapon when confronting African American suspects compared to confrontations with white or Hispanic suspects. Accusing the country’s police departments of inherent prejudice only feeds the extreme liberal narrative that police departments should be disbanded altogether.

Additional Resources

Policing in America: Lessons from the Past, Opportunities for the Future

Confronting Police Abuse Requires Shifting Power From Police Unions

Reform of Policing: What Makes Sense—and What Doesn’t

FICTION: “Police officers increase the likelihood of violence and crime against Americans.”

FACT: Simply put: the more policing there is, the safer America is.

Take the example of New York City which had its peak homicide rate in 1990 after several decades of pursuing a policing system which pushed officers into the background and relegated them to simply responding to crimes. In 1990, New York City had 2,245 murders. After switching to community-based policing with the goal of preventing crime, New York City has seen a dramatic decrease in both shootings and murders (down to 292 in 2017), resulting in a safer city. This is in large part due to officer training, increased police diversification, and improved policing methods. The fact is that American communities are overwhelmingly safer with police than without police.

Additional Resource

Cops Count, Police Matter: Preventing Crime and Disorder in the 21st Century

FICTION: “To stop police violence we need to defund the police.”

FACT: This argument is simply irrational. America needs police officers to maintain law and order.

Defunding our nation’s police departments would only lead to more crime and chaos and would directly harm the communities who disproportionately suffer the most. Additionally, defunding police departments will only lead to tighter budget constraints and less well-equipped police officers, making it even harder for police officers to do an already difficult and stressful job. However, in instances in which police officers use force outside the bounds of their training or even unlawfully, often union contracts stand in the way of appropriate discipline. Therefore, to stop unlawful police violence it is important that we reform the police union contract system.

An Unbelievable Labor Contract

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Yesterday Mike Antonucci at Hot Air posted a few excerpts from the current contract covering National Education Association employees.

The article reports:

About 500 people work at NEA national headquarters in Washington, DC. A handful of unions represent them, the largest being the National Education Association Staff Organization (NEASO). NEA and NEASO negotiated a 136-page collective bargaining agreement in June 2012, and it runs through the end of May 2015. I have posted the full document on EIA’s Declassified page, but to save you the energy of mining it yourself, here are a few provisions I thought were worthy of highlighting:

…NEA must assume financial liability for an employee who is prosecuted or sued “because of any act taken by him/her in the course of his/her employment.” Under these circumstances, unless the employee is guilty of “gross negligence or gross irresponsibility,” he or she “shall be paid at his/her regular hourly rate for all time spent in jail.”

…NEA is required to provide “an appropriately furnished lounge” for employees at union headquarters. The contract specifically requires NEA to “make an ice machine available to employees in the building.”

There are many other provisions, including reserved parking spaces, valet services when traveling, and other things that most of us would never expect to see in an employment contract. Most of us would love to be covered by an employment contract that covers the items this contract does, but most of us realize that if a company wants to stay in business (and thus provide us with a job), they would probably not be able to afford a contract similar to the one that covers the NEA employees. The article unintentionally points out how big the gap has become between working in the private sector and working for an agency related to the government.

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General Motors (aka Government Motors) and the UAW Have Agreed On A Contract (Or Why I Drive A Mustang)

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Normally, I wouldn’t particularly care whether or not GM reached a contract agreement with the UAW, but since the government has made me a stockholder, I thought that maybe I should pay attention.

The International Business Times reported on Saturday that a new contract between GM and the UAW has been tentatively agreed on. The contract includes signing bonuses and better profit sharing for the employees.

The article reports:

Workers at Chrysler Group LLC, whose contract also expired on September 14, continue to negotiate for terms of their new deal.

The UAW is not allowed to call strikes for workers at GM and Chrysler under the terms of the federal bailouts which those companies received.

Workers at Ford Motor (which did not receive a federal bailout, which allows them to strike) are also in talks for a new contract.

Any bets on the possibility of a UAW strike action against Ford this year?

There is one aspect of this contract that I could not find any reporting on. In his book, Car Wreck, Mark Ragsdale explains an auto industry practice called ‘jobs banks.’ Jobs banks require that two and a half years of wages be paid to laid off workers. On February 10, 2009, Ford Motor Company announced it had negotiated jobs banks penalties out of its UAW contracts. Because Ford rejected federal bailout money, the UAW was forced to negotiate in order to avoid the company going bankrupt. I suspect the UAW will try very hard this year to put those jobs banks penalties back in.

Taxpayer bailout money is currently paying General Motors workers for work while they sit at the ‘jobs bank’ all day and do nothing–another example of a total waste of tax dollars. Obviously when this was done by a private company (GM), it was not practical–the company had to be bailed out, so why is the government allowing the nonprofitable behavior to continue? It will be interesting to see what happens to the jobs banks in the new contract and if the UAW decides to strike Ford to put the jobs banks back in there.

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