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Sunday Herald column ping

Howie Carr solves this mess
By Howie Carr | Sunday, April 26, 2009 | http://www.bostonherald.com | Columnists

Tomorrow, the House begins budget hearings against a dire fiscal backdrop - a state that is $400 million in the red, with layoffs, service cuts and new taxes looming. Following is Howie Carr’s 10-point plan for rescuing Massachusetts.

Let’s get right to the cutting - this is by no means a comprehensive list, but it’ll do for a start.

No. 1: Close at least one-third of the state’s district courthouses and lay off everybody working in them, from judges to janitors. We’re not talking about shutting down any courts with heavy caseloads, only places with busier courts nearby (like Charlestown and Brookline) or those in the boondocks, where seldom is heard any case of any significance, and never on Fridays.

Perhaps the best example of an unneeded district court is the one in Ipswich, covering those crime-ridden burgs of Hamilton, Wenham, Topsfield and Ipswich. Let Newburyport handle all those polo-pony rustling cases, not to mention the clam poachers.

How about Orange District Court? According to Mass. Lawyers Diary, Orange has two judges, a clerk-magistrate, an assistant clerk magistrate, a sessions clerk, a chief probation officer, an assistant chief probation officer and three probation officers. And that doesn’t even include the “custodians,” translators or secretaries.

Consider Stoughton District Court. It employs five - count ’em, five - probation officers. How many urine samples do you really need to collect each week in the mean streets of Avon?

Talk about forgotten but not gone. At Gardner District Court, one $67,039.95-a-year probation officer is named Monte G. Basbas Jr. Surely he’s not related to the late Monte G. Basbas Sr., former mayor of Newton and then presiding justice of the Newton District Court.

A very partial list of other eminently closable courthouses: Hingham, Wareham, Attleboro, Natick, Peabody, Palmer, Dudley, Clinton, Uxbridge and Winchendon.

No. 2: Move as many agencies and branches as possible out of their privately owned digs where they are often charged exorbitant rents by well-connected landlords. How many RMV branches could you move into the shuttered courthouses?

No. 3: Mr. Patrick, tear down those toll booths. It is absolutely the most ineffective way to collect taxes - according to at least one estimate, it costs as much as 79 cents to collect a buck at the tollbooths, and that doesn’t even include the rampant thievery. The gas tax, as odious as it is, costs less than a penny to collect a dollar’s worth of taxes.

No. 4: This one is for the Republican party: Run candidates in every legislative district, even if you have to put up the lame and the halt. That was how Tip O’Neill did it in the 1940s - he’d field Democrats in even the most Republican districts, getting the challenger’s name out and waiting for the GOP incumbent to retire or move on, at which point the Democrat would have more name recognition than the new Republican. Every cycle, Tip’s Dems picked off a few more GOP seats. The Democrats finally took over the Massachusetts House in 1946, and haven’t looked back. The other plus: Whenever a summer scandal breaks (think OUI, think young girlfriend working for lobbyist, think money-laundering scheme), the Republicans would already have a candidate in place to take advantage of the anti-incumbent vote.

No. 5: Begin ending entitlements. Take the Quinn Bill - please. Does anyone, even cops, seriously argue that a B.A. these days means anything other than BS? Yet these cops’ phony-baloney degrees are costing the taxpayers $50 million a year. A leadership effort in the House to rein them in has already failed, even before the budget comes to the floor. The solons are more fearful of the unions than they are of the taxpayers, and as long as they are running unopposed (see No. 4) why shouldn’t they be?

No. 6: Abolish outside sections to the budget, those hundreds of pages of arcane matters attached in conference committee without either public input or fingerprints. This is where a lot of the real mischief occurs, especially with pension finagling. Every piece of legislation should have a hearing and be debated openly, which happens less than ever - although for some reason, the steep drop-off in formal sessions has caused no corresponding decrease in the number of days the reps claim they come to the State House, the better to collect their per diems.

No. 7: Speaking of which, abolish per diems for legislators. It’s a relatively small amount of money (between $10 and $110 a day) but all that free money (doled out on the honor system, believe it or not) sends the wrong message. Their constituents don’t get paid for driving to work, why should the reps? And while we’re at, no more take-home state vehicles, period.

No. 8: Fire every state employee with more than one diminutive in his title. Words like deputy, associate, assistant, vice, executive - these are mostly code words for “hack.” The use of two or more of them in one job description - say, “associate vice chancellor” - virtually guarantees that you are talking about someone with a relative in . . . a district courthouse. Added benefit: These layabouts tend to be among the highest paid - check it out for yourself by going to thestate payroll databases on the Herald Web site.

No. 9: Henceforward, no more defined-benefit pensions. Obviously, you can’t renege on commitments already made to people who’ve paid in, but you can freeze all future contributions and move them to 401(k)s, just the way it’s been done to millions of workers in the Dreaded Private Sector. Public employees used to get good pensions because they weren’t paid as much as they theoretically could have made in the DPS. Now they make more money - a lot more, in most cases. They don’t have to worry nearly as much about losing their jobs, they get three times as many sick days, plus extra holidays . . . and behind all that comes the pension.

No. 10: So much waste, fraud and abuse, so little space. Make the state employees pay more of their health-care costs, and any city or town that won’t crack down on “fixed costs” should be penalized with corresponding cuts in local aid. Abolish all quasi-public authorities - it’s too easy for hacks to hide in them, undetected, like foot fungus. Don’t allow any municipality to impose any local-option taxes (such as a 7 percent meals tax) unless the local electorate has OK’d a Prop 2 override. If Boston needs so much dough, how come Mumbles never goes to the voters seeking their OK for an increase in the property tax?

And finally, elected officials have to start reading what they vote on or sign off on. How pathetic is it that city officials in Malden and Lynn claim they had no idea they were handing out fat pensions to undeserving hacks - and we all have such a low opinion of their intelligence that we believe they were that stupid?

The problem is, in a democracy, the people get the government they deserve. Nothing happens until the taxpayers wake up, start taking names and kicking butt. Don’t hold your breath.
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/columnists/view.bg?articleid=1168070