Marty Trillhaase Finally Gets One Right.
In the Opinion section of the Idaho Statesman we find our bozo reporter of the Lewiston Tribune beating up on Governor Otter for his handling of Teresa Luna’s resignation from the Department of Administration. Evidently we must have a new policy for letting employees go from a government job. Instead of two weeks notice, we give them 2 years notice before they actually have to abdicate their position, and in the meantime we get to pay Teresa Luna’s salary of $95,000 and Mr. Reynolds, the person taking her place $87,000 per year. Not a bad deal for government employees if you’re part of the Otter team. As he said in an interview with Mellissa Davlin that in his eight years in office he has not terminated one member of the team that has produced such mediocre results.
It’s nice to know that the Governor takes care of his “TEAM” with our money. I’m beginning to think that maybe A.J. Balukoff would not have been such a bad choice now that we have seen what Governor Otter is really made of. We have had scandal after scandal under his administration, and no one seems to care. The establishment Republicans stand behind him in lock step. Could it be because they are all tied to the state government teat in one way or another? When you think about the billions of dollars that our state spends on various contracts you have to understand that there are going to be some problems with corruption, but what we have seen is obscene in terms of money down the toilet, and yet no one seems to care.
We believe that the IEN scandal is just the tip of the iceberg. Luna waited 10 months to inform the public about the problems with the contract, and yet she was allowed to stay on for this extended period of time at full pay. How many more scandals can our state withstand before we run out of money to pay for them? We have yet to hear the outcome of the prison investigation being done by the FBI, and who knows what will come out of this problem with the FCC and our IEN.
The Governor and his wife have been out with Public Service Announcements about how good Common Core is going to be for the children of Idaho. If this program is so good, why do they have to promote it, shouldn’t it promote itself? We can’t wait to find out how much corruption is involved with Common Core in our state. The $61 million paid to the Pearson Co. for the “Schoolnet” evaluation program we believe is just the tip of the iceberg, and that there will be many more wasted projects involved in the implementation of Common Core in our state. Any time you have a program that involves the entire country and every school system you will inevitably find a lot of wasted money. Fact is that no one has been able to tell us how much taxpayer money it will take to implement Common Core in our state or better yet how much it will cost to dump it should this system not work out.
We are thankful for the fact that Tom Luna is no longer in charge of our school system and that Supt. Ybarra and her assistant Tom Corder have corrected many of the onerous contracts he left on the books with Common Core, but they need to start listening to the parents and citizens of Idaho. Parents have already displayed their displeasure with the SBAC test and have been keeping their children from taking this test. One size does not fit all in Idaho, and we have more problems with our school system than the implementation of Common Core, but we don’t see anyone working on any of those problems. When will our children matter more than politics?
