Letters to the editor for Aug. 30

• Published August 30, 2008

• Comments (0)

Tumwater unfriendly to new business

Let's investigate Tumwater's budget shortfall. To begin, the council cannot get it through their heads that business equals income.

They continually let retailers and commercial developers know that their business is unwanted.

They obviously and erroneously believe that residential property taxes only will continue to provide the tax money necessary to operate the city. In their finite minds, they cannot understand that sales taxes and business and occupation taxes are the keys to operating a city's general fund.

Also, a council member (Joan Cathey) focused her campaign on opening the north end fire station. She then made it clear that her campaign was deceptive when she voted for the commercial moratorium in the face of pleading testimony to the contrary by a firefighter.

Along with the council deficiencies, the Development Services Department has serious problems, which originate at the top. The pompous nature of the department leadership continually holds up the process of development.

Building and engineering are at odds, as the leadership allows building to issue permits before engineering has signed off on its part of a project. Projects get held up because developers will not stroke leadership egos.

Finally, city administration is too weak to control this department's leadership.

Aaron Young, Olympia

What ever happened to merit increases?

I read where people are complaining about percentage raises. The cost of living must be a lot greater for those with large incomes because the percentages and the resulting increase are so much larger.

It seems that lower wage earners get lower percentages. Should it not be that lower wage earners get a higher percentage? I'm certain our elderly on Social Security and minimum wage earners would agree.

In this day and age raises, come automatically for length of service (maybe). Whatever happened to merit raises for those who do well above average work or where output has increased the company profits. I think perhaps we all could agree that some employees or elected officials are worth a lot more or a lot less than what they now receive, based on a job description rate.