Supervisors' Raise

Dear Santa Cruz Sentinel,
I recently read an article in your paper regarding the county supervisors’ decision to raise their salaries to $100,000 a year, and I have to say that I found it quite disheartening. The article discussed the idea that they did this so as to avoid having the intelligent employees of the county leave for higher paying jobs. This makes me wonder why we are so attached to people who apparently don’t care enough about the community to stay for the amount of money they are making already, which I’m sure is much more than a living wage. Besides, the county is trying to compete with other counties whose budgets are much larger than Santa Cruz’s own, and are able to allot more of their money to their employees.

The other aspect of the article that upset me was the comparison of employee salaries to the amount of potholes in the city streets. Yes, driving on a bumpy road can be annoying, but what about education and youth programs? I am part of Shakespeare Santa Cruz’s Shakes-To-Go program which tours with an abridged Shakespeare play to different elementary schools, middle schools and high schools in the area, and it is astonishing to see the shape some of these schools are in. In many schools there is no stage for us to perform on, the students don’t have a theatre program to participate in, or it is the first play they have ever seen. Maybe instead of giving themselves more money, or adding more cement to the world, the county supervisors could consider investing their money in something a little more important in the world.