1. Payroll Freeze:

In order to balance out the financial crisis, lets impose a 2 year freeze on both the city and the school payrolls. NO salary increases.

2. Salary Decreases:

To gain access to fast dollars, lets impose a 5-10% salary "decrease" starting with upper level management and working your way down to the lower level management. Yes, this means that the Mayor and his staff and the Superintendent and his staff and all of their management administrators, would have get off their high horses and come down and be paid like their normal 40 hr a week employees.

3. Performance Evaluations:

How many city or school employees are worth anywhere from $70,000 to $200, 000 and beyond?? If I remember correctly, in Biology 101, the total composition of the human body was valued at $.96 cents.  Every employee, including management, should evaluate their own performances. Every manager should evaluate their employees performance then get together and see what the actual salary or hourly rate should be. Actually, this should be the function of the (2) Human Services Departments.

4. Residency Requirement:

All City and School administrators and staff should be required to live in the City of Newton. This will avoid any arguments to proposals 1 and 2 and 3. If all employees lived in the city, I believe that they (being tax-payers) would pay attention as to how the administrators are handling their finances.

5. Board of Aldermen/women:

I believe that the City of Worcester is about as close to the same population as the City of Newton. Yet, if I am not mistaken, I believe that Worcester has only eight Councelmen. The City of Newton has eight wards. So, one ward alderman/woman is all that's necessary. We do not need 24 aldermen/women.

6. Financial Advisor:

The City of Newton should hire a person that knows financial matters. This person would over-see the city and school budgets and also report to the Board of Aldermen/women and the School Committee during budget and appropriation time.

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