Stan Geiger

Why, Councilors?

Bell, California has become a bell cow for the rest of the nation. CBS now reports the city councilors in Bell were pulling down a hundred grand a year because of one or two minutes spent at BS meetings of one sort or another.

I think we need to take a hard look at Tulsa's local governing council. We've got four local TV stations that claim to be news stations, five if you count OETA's statewide news station. We've got one prominent daily paper, and a few other lesser papers in business around town. We've got a blogger or two in Oklahoma that claim to be able to dig up news. It shouldn't be too much of a task to find the answer to a simple question: Why does anyone want to be on the Tulsa City Council in exchange for a meager 18 grand a year?

Sitting Councilor Jack Henderson made a big stink about councilor pay a year or two ago. He pushed for a tripling of councilor pay, claiming a lot of hours put in for which he was not compensated. He sounded a lot like a schoolteacher.

Henderson was shouted down. He didn't get his tripling of pay. He ran for reelection, nonetheless. He held a job that he bitterly claimed vastly underpaid him for his labor yet he signed on for another couple of years.

Why?

I don't pay much attention to the City Council. But I know there is at least one lawyer sitting on the Council. I know from personal experience that lawyers aren't fond of doing anything for less then a couple of hundred bucks an hour. Lawyers think they are special people, and they think their time is worth more than the time of others.

You know, I could probably beat most attorneys in a court of law. Give me some time and access to a law library, and I bet I could beat most of them in a court of law. I don't, however, get paid a couple of hundred bucks an hour---or more---for my time and effort. But that's another story.

The point is, why would a lawyer---or anybody else for that matter---line up for a job that pays minimum wage?

I reckon the answer to that question lies in the fact that there is more to the story.

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