20060410 Westminster Employee Action

20060410 Westminster Employee Action

Note: I was given this document by certain Westminster City Employees anonymously… KED

April 10, 2006

Employee action: Most of the employees agree with most of these points. Not all the employees agree with all the points. Police not included.

1. Non-sworn employees have waited several years for an increase in pay and benefits. During this wait, police officers and certain other employees have received substantial pay increases.
2. Non-sworn employees need to be prioritized for FY 2007 pay and benefit enhancements.
3. Relations between the mayor and council - and employees are at a crisis breaking point. All communication has broken down. The situation at present appears to have passed a point where anything can repair the relations.
4. Employees feel blown-off by current mayor and council. Current mayor and council are condescending and only give lip service to the employees. Efforts from the mayor seem misleading, superficial, and not sincere.
5. Employees distrust current mayor and council and feel they lack integrity.
6. Employees lack confidence that the current mayor and council have the competence to run the city. The city is not a bank, where you can make it up as you go.
7. Many feel the mayor and council are in it for themselves and not for the city.
8. Many feel that the mayor only wants to be the mayor, so he can say that he is the mayor. There is concern that councilmen just want to run for higher office and are using the city and its employees for their own gain.
9. Mayor and council don’t know the employees, their jobs or how things work and don’t appear to care to know.
10. Mayor and council do not back up employees leaving them to twist in the wind.
11. Employees afraid to disagree or take their problems to the mayor and council because they fear negative repercussions.
12. Employee attempts to talk with press ignored by Carroll County Times and Baltimore Sun, which appears to not question mayor, while the Times and the Sun questions all the other towns.
13. Employees have to look out for their own best interests.
14. This mayor and council not looking out for employees – just themselves. As a result, employees actively seeking union representation, feeling that they have no choice. Outside union organizers have contacted city personnel to take advantage of this situation.
15. The mayor and city council have created employee unrest and low morale for which union organizers can capitalize.
16. Confidential employee morale study not confidential and further lowered morale.
17. Concern that if mayor and council raise taxes and/or if the employees get a pay raise; the mayor and council will blame the tax increase on employees and not on their wasteful spending, which includes the city manager.
18. Right now, employees don’t see long-range plan for the city, except what is in it for mayor and council.
19. Employees don’t know where the city is going or what to do.
20. Whatever is agreed to can change whenever mayor and council find it expedient with no feedback or consulting with the employees. Things just seem to be made up as they go.
21. Making recreation a department level ill timed and made morale worse. Used money that should have gone to other employees, while other employees have been waiting for years for pay parity. Decision to make recreation a department was knee-jerk and made by suspending the rules and doing it all at one council meeting. As a result, an employee quit and another threatened to quit.
22. While other employees wait and wait for pay relief, recreation made department level without a committee or study. Proof that a study is just a stalling technique.
23. Meanwhile city has no separate independent human resources department - but now has a director level recreation department.
24. Mayor and council considered an information technology director – before it had a department level human resources director.
25. There is a strong lack of trust for current human resources office. Employees feel that confidentiality is not maintained.
26. Employees impatient for things to change for the better. Feel too many committees are a ruse to insulate mayor and council from decisions.
27. Mayor doesn’t accept responsibility for anything – especially if he can hide behind a committee.
28. Employees are proud to be frugal and save the city money. They don’t need to be given money rewards by mayor and council, their pride is their reward.
29. Employees proud to do their job well and solve problems creatively, when there is lack of budget.
30. Hiring a city manager is an affront to the employees and destroys a sense of team. Previous mayor did the job for $10k a year.
31. Last time city hired a city manager it didn’t work.
32. Money to be used on city manager is not necessary and could be better spent elsewhere.
33. City manager will only add an additional insulating layer between employees and mayor and council. City manager position does not have support of employees.
34. City manager adds complicating layer between public and city. Often citizens currently have direct access to city and can get things done.
35. July 1999, new contributory pension system became effective…
36. June 2000, 129 employees, including some police, had to choose paying one-year retroactive cost or be penalized when they retired.
37. It would have cost the city approximately $75,000 to pay the retroactive costs for the 129 employees under the new contributory pension system.
38. City didn’t offer to pay the retroactive amount. When LEOPS was subsequently adopted for the police officers, all retroactive contributions were paid by the city.
39. 2000 to 2001 Budget, only police officers received reclassified pay scale: $1,200 more than everyone else. This did not include other non-sworn police personnel.
40. Fiscal year 2002 to 2003, city council gave employees a 1% cost of living increase when cost of living in area with month used for calculation was actually 2.2%.
41. 2002: city police got union representation and started requests for separate retirement system (LEOPS).
42. 2002: city offered police a plan where the city would put in between 5 to 9% of officers annual salary based on the number of years they have been employed. The police officers rejected the offer.
43. Now police seem to have what they want. (Baltimore Sun, November 12, 2002). LEOPS will cost the city $364,000 a year or $17 million over 25 years after factoring in inflation and additional officers. Police gave up their pay raises the next year to support the plan. Yet several years later, they got a triple-step increase.
44. LEOPS was adopted July 2003 and the city paid the police contribution retroactively.
45. City employees would like an improved non-LEOPS pension plan. The 401a can be used as an instrument to increase the percent available to city employees at the time of retirement. Six percent, with an equal match, would be great. The city’s goal should strive for 50% of an employee’s salary at retirement.
46. The city employees would like to be compensated for unused sick leave at retirement.
47. Improved longevity and shift differential is important. Longevity needs to reflect cost of living changes. Our number is static and not pegged to inflation.
48. Non-sworn employees have waited several years for an increase in pay and benefits. During this wait, police officers and certain other employees have received substantial pay increases.
49. Non-sworn employees need to be prioritized for FY 2007 pay and benefit enhancements.

20060410 Westminster Common Council Meeting Agenda

CITY OF WESTMINSTER, MARYLAND

Mayor and Council Meeting on April 10, 2006

AGENDA

1. CALL TO ORDER – 7:00 P.M.

2. MINUTES OF THE MEETING OF MARCH 27, 2006

3. REPORTS FROM MAYOR

4. REPORTS FROM STANDING COMMITTEES

5. ORDINANCES AND RESOLUTIONS:

a. Introduction of Ordinance No. 747 – Floodplain Ordinance and Floodplain Management Manual

b. Introduction of Ordinance No. 748 – Environmental Management of Storm Sewer Systems

c. Introduction of Ordinance No. 749 – Intergovernmental Relations

d. Introduction of Ordinance No. 750 – City Administrator

6. UNFINISHED BUSINESS:

a. Update on West Green Street Reconstruction Project

7. NEW BUSINESS:

a. Closed Session to Discuss the Acquisition of Real Property

b. Approval of Carroll County Cable Regulatory Commission Budget for

Fiscal Year 2007

8. DEPARTMENTAL REPORTS

9. CITIZEN COMMENTS

10. ADJOURN

Gordon Parks - An American Cultural Icon passes Away at 93

Gordon Parks - An American Cultural Icon passes Away at 93
April 5, 2006 By Kevin Dayhoff

A tribute to the life of a man, in which love, dignity and hard work overcome hatred and bigotry.

Last month on March 7, a cultural icon and one of America’s greatest artists, Gordon Parks, passed away at the too-young age of 93, in Manhattan.

Born in abject poverty, Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks came into this world on November 12, 1912 in Fort Scott, Kansas, to a tenant farming family.

He was the youngest of 15 children. By age sixteen, at the dawn of the Great Depression in 1928, his mother died and he ended up homeless in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Kenny Irby wrote a poignant March 15, 2006 retrospective on “Poynter on Line” - “Gordon Parks: From Country Boy to Renaissance Man, A True Photographic Idol, IN MEMORIAM: 1912-2006.” In his essay, Mr. Irby called to our attention:

“Delores Johnson -- formerly with The Kansas City Star, now, with The Virginian-Pilot -- photographed Parks in April 2004, at what is believed to be his last extended photo session.

“Parks was the first black photographer to penetrate through racial barriers at Life magazine and many other agencies. During his photo session with Johnson, he recalled how some whites would not allow him to photograph them, how he was often turned away because of the color of his skin”.

There are many fascinating aspects of the Gordon Parks story, which spans many “revolutions” in the history of American public policy, scope and approach of government and social progress.

But, for an artist as prolific and accomplished as Mr. Parks, many folks are not aware of his name, although most are aware of his work.

Mr. Parks credits his mother with having a profound influence upon his life. Isn’t it so with many of us? She taught him that he could do anything to which he set his mind to do.

Mr. Irby reveals, “In one of (Mr. Parks’) autobiographies, "A Choice of Weapons," he says his mother "placed love, dignity and hard work over hatred, she always told me that I could do whatever little white boys did and that I had better do it better."”

Indeed, it was by his work ethic and his enormous talent that he escaped the chains of poverty or simply becoming another sad statistic of the Great Depression.

It is reported that he was famous for being a workaholic and a taskmaster well into old age.

In an excellent 2,700-word memoriam in the New York Times, Andy Grundberg wrote that Mr. Parks was a “photographer, filmmaker, writer and composer who used his prodigious, largely self-taught talents to chronicle the African-American experience.

“But as an “iconoclast, Mr. Parks fashioned a career that resisted categorization.”

For most of the 1930s, he supported himself by playing piano in a brothel, basketball and working as a busboy. It was in 1938, while working on the Chicago to Seattle train as a waiter, Mr. Parks noticed a discarded magazine with photographs from the Farm Security Administration, and became interested in photography.

In 1937, he purchased a “Voightlander Brilliant” camera, for $12.50 at a pawnshop in Seattle. He began free-lancing as a fashion photographer at local department stores in St. Paul, Minnesota.

It was here that he happened to take a photo of the heavyweight boxer, Joe Lewis’ wife, Marva Lewis. Impressed with the photo, she encouraged him to move to Chicago, where he gained attention doing a photo-documentary series of the poorer black areas of town.

In 1941, he had an exhibition of these photographs that earned him a fellowship from the Julius Rosenwald Foundation. The fellowship paid him $200.00 per month so that he could find photography assignments. That year, he joined the photographic documentation project of the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration, in Washington, D.C., as an intern.

At the age of thirty, Mr. Parks found himself working with photographers such as Marion Post Wolcott, John Vachon, Jack Delano, John Collier, Dorothea Lange and Russell Lee, under the direction of Roy Emerson Stryker.

The photograph for which he may be the most famous was “American Gothic,” which he took while he was with the FSA, in 1942. Mr. Grundberg, describes it best in his New York Times article: “it shows a black cleaning woman named Ella Watson standing stiffly in front of an American flag, a mop in one hand and a broom in the other. Mr. Parks wanted the picture to speak to the existence of racial bigotry and inequality in the nation's capital. He was in an angry mood when he asked the woman to pose, having earlier been refused service at a clothing store, a movie theater and a restaurant.”

Landon Nordeman, in a May 1, 1997 paper written on Walker Evans and documentary photography, gives us an idea of the extraordinary fortunate consequence of the FSA photographic documentation project for generations of historians; in 1944, 270,000 negatives and 77,000 prints by FSA photographers was deposited with the Library of Congress in Washington.

The Farm Security Administration was discontinued in 1943, as the nation’s attention continued to focus on World War II. Mr. Parks transferred to the Office of War Information.

Numerous accounts recall, “One of his assignments was photographing the training of the first unit of black fighter pilots, the 332nd Fighter Group. Prohibited from accompanying them to Europe and documenting their participation in the war effort, Parks left in disgust…” (www.gale.com)

He resigned in 1944 and moved to Harlem in New York City and began free-lancing for Vogue magazine.

According to a biographical sketch by Sharisse Foster, “… He then shoots for the Standard Oil Photography project in New Jersey. It is here that he produces some of his most inspiring work including "Dinner Time at Mr. Hercules Brown's Home” (1944), and "Grease Plant Worker” (1946). In these images he depicts the industrial workers in small cities.”

After several years with Vogue, he was able to attract the eye of Life magazine. In 1948, he took a job as a photojournalist with Life that until 1972, took him all over the world, photographing everything from fashion in Paris to the slums of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil to celebrity portraiture.

In 1963, he wrote an autobiographical novel, “The Learning Tree,” in which chronicled much of his childhood in Kansas. In 1969, he adapted “The Learning Tree” into a screenplay, wrote the musical score and directed the movie, by the same name.

It wasn’t until the late 1960s, that the baby boomer generation started to take notice of his work, mostly documenting the Black Panther movement and the struggle for civil rights.

But it was when he burst into the world of commercial Hollywood in 1971, with what many refer to now as “blaxploitation films,” that he gained the attention of the emerging pop culture of the children of the 60s.

Yes, this is the gentleman who in 1971 directed "Shaft," starring Richard Roundtree as the cool, black leather jacket-clad private detective.

The movie was released on July 2, 1971. I saw it in Greensboro (or Burlington – as one gets older the mind is the first to go) NC, where I witnessed much of the audience get up and leave the theatre not too long after the movie began…

Remember the music score was by Isaac Hayes? Wikipedia confirmed some old notes that the “movie was adapted by Ernest Tidyman and John D. F. Black from Tidyman's 1971 novel of the same name…. It won an Academy Award for Best Music, Song for Isaac Hayes for "Theme from Shaft". It was nominated for Best Music, Original Dramatic Score…. In 2000, the United States Library of Congress deemed the original film "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.”

Mr. Parks followed this up with "Shaft's Big Score!" in 1972. What is little known is that originally, “Shaft” was written as a straightforward detective movie with a white detective.

However, with the huge success of movie, “Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song,” a few months earlier, it was quickly realized that the money was in the neophyte genre of blaxploitation movies and the film was quickly adapted.

Many of the younger readers became aware of this genre of movies when Samuel L. Jackson starred in a remake of the movie in 2000.

Mr. Parks continued to write books, do films for television, pursuing photography and even composing music right up until his death.

Seldom do contemporary artists exhibit talent in so many different ways. His legacy is that of overcoming obstacles with hard work, focus, perseverance and determination.

He was an artist with a profound social conscious, who never lost track of his responsibility to the public, from which he earned a living.

He set the standards high and served as an example for many of us, that life is not about excuses. It is about taking personal responsibility for our lives, rolling up our sleeves and just going it.

Mr. Parks life is a tribute that love, dignity and hard work will always overcome hatred. One wonders what he could have accomplished if he didn’t have overcome the barriers of hatred and bigotry. Wouldn’t it better if we lived in a world, in which love, dignity and hard work could utilize the springboard of an enlightened society where color, race, religion or ethnic background didn’t matter.

Dr. Martin Luther King said, in his famous August 28, 1963, “I have a Dream” speech, “I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

In 1959, in “The Measures of Man,” Dr. King shared with us, “Man is man because he is free to operate within the framework of his destiny. He is free to deliberate, to make decisions, and to choose between alternatives. He is distinguished from animals by his freedom to do evil or to do good and to walk the high road of beauty or tread the low road of ugly degeneracy.”

History has fortunately judged Gordon Parks by the content of his character and his choice “to walk the high road of beauty.” We have been fortunate enough to benefit from the content of his character and the beauty he left behind.

Gordon Parks is an inspiration for all of us, whether we are artists or community leaders or whatever role we wish to play in making our planet a better world.

Gordon Parks will be missed. May he rest in peace. God Bless.

Author’s note: On March 29, 2006, I wrote a tribute to Gordon Parks in The Tentacle. This memoriam expands upon much of that column, but takes advantage of not having a word limit.

Kevin Dayhoff writes from Westminster Maryland USA.
He may reached at kevindayhoff AT gmail.com or visit him at www.westminstermarylandonline.net

####

20060405 Gordon Parks

*****

Kevin Dayhoff Soundtrack: http://www.kevindayhoff.net/ Kevin Dayhoff's The New Bedford Herald: http://kbetrue.livejournal.com/ Kevin Dayhoff Art: http://www.kevindayhoffart.com/ Blip.fm: http://blip.fm/kevindayhoff_soundtrack Kevin Dayhoff Westminster: http://www.westgov.net/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/kevindayhoff Twitpic: http://twitpic.com/photos/kevindayhoff YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/kevindayhoff Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1040426835 Kevin Dayhoff Banana Stems: http://kevindayhoff.tumblr.com/