Fredonia Trustees Talk Pay Cuts

This morning, Michael Rukavina of the Dunkirk Observer reported on last night Village Trustees' Meeting. Other than the usual boring agenda, Trustee Susan Mackay proposed that the board consider a pay reduction, either in salary or in their travel expense budgets. Currently, board members receive $5,500 annually with $600 in travel expences. Mayor Michael Sullivan appreciated the gesture, but not wanting to be outdone, stated that if any pay was to be cut, it should be the Mayor's.

He announced, "Sue is sincere. She sees state officials being called to take a cut in pay and everyone has a cut, everyone has to give a little and I think it's a sincere thing if there's some way of making a showing. The bigger problem is how many elected officials do we need in the village and town serving everybody? If we really want to make a real show we should start having meetings to move forward with a coterminous town and village or something larger. To ask people who are already doing a job where they're having to leave their families, having to leave other job options that they would have, to spend time during the week to do trustees work ... you don't want to discourage people from getting involved."

For those who don't know (I had to look it up), coterminous means 'having the same border or covering the same area' according to dictionary.com.

Its no surprise that there's an election to be held in Fredonia next week.