It took me by surprise I must say,
When I found out yesterday.
Don’t you know that…
I heard it through the grapevine
The Lyrics of Marvin Gaye,
Heard it through the Grapevine.1968
Prince Rupert’s mainstream media seems to have finally caught up with the local grapevine of the coffee shop conversations and the wired ruminations of the city’s internet addicted populace.
The question over some recent personnel issues at City Hall, has migrated from the ever active Prince Rumour mill, through the bulletin boards of the local chat forum hackingthemainframe and now on to both the Northern View and the Daily News.,
"A city in financial difficulties certainly shouldn’t be offering financial incentives, or skipping over normal personnel procedures simply to bridge “a crazy timeâ€
Saffron, while I do agree that your point is valid, regarding salary structure and potential applicants and the burden of attracting qualified candidates.
However, any business must eventually decide at what point they have to draw a line on what they can afford and to what limits they must puruse any applicant.
When you are struggling,(as we were then and still are today) you can really only offer what you can afford to pay, since at the time of the hiring the tax base was continuing to decline with out migration, perhaps that should really have been the time to tighten the municipal belt.
It would seem that at the time with according to the Mayor an apparently less than full file folder of resumes, the Mayor and Council decided that it was better to agree with the financial demands made of the one applicant they had fixated on.
We’ll never really know how many others applied, what their “demands” might have been or what experience they might have brought to the offices of city hall.
So, we’ll respectfully agree to disagree with you Saffron on this one and we’ll watch with interest to see how it all plays out.
Well, that’s one way of looking at it I suppose but as with any other business, you get what you pay for. I consider Rupert a very tough sell when it comes to recruiting in certain job sectors and while I realise people are upset over the dollar figures being talked about, I just wanted to point out that the salary range for the average upper civic management for a city of that size is most definitely not small change.