Posted by: jimfior02 on: February 7, 2009
Last week, we had the greatest increase in unemployment since 1974. Roughly 3 million have now lost their jobs since the start of this recession.
President Obama has proposed a stimulus package that, while not prefect by any means, would add jobs and help get the country moving again. The President’s critics say it is a [...]
Posted by: jimfior02 on: August 5, 2008
I can see from the posts on this blog that I have evidently not done a good job of explaining our city’s finances to our fine employees. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be taking some time to better explain our finances, and why we can not always give people what they want and what [...]
Posted by: jimfior02 on: July 29, 2008
Our contracts with our unions provide that if an employee needs time off for union business, then they can do that on city time and we will pay them for the time. If we have to fill the spot with another employee, we pay that other employee time and half. All of this is standard [...]
Posted by: jimfior02 on: July 23, 2008
There has been a lot written about overtime and sick leave in the city. We are taking steps to control and limit the amount of overtime and sick leave being taken.
This has the fire department union bent out of shape, and they used the City council meeting on Tuesday to take a few shots at [...]
Posted by: jimfior02 on: July 13, 2008
The Eagle Tribune wrote a story recently on our efforts to control overtime and sick leave in the city budget. There were some errors in the story, some very minor, some not so minor. The overall gist of the story was correct: we have a problem with sick leave and we are working hard to correct [...]
Posted by: jimfior02 on: April 2, 2008
I met today with the race organizers from several races and with Deputy Thompson from the police department It was a very cordial and friendly meeting.
Everyone was in agreement that, whenever possible, we will use auxillary police to avoid charging for details at road races. The races we have in Haverhill today are charitable races. [...]
