Monday, March 16, 2009

Governor Patrick Answers a Question

Governor Patrick was recently in Salem holding a town hall meeting on his proposed transportation reform, including a 19-cent increase to the gas tax.  It was a friendly audience at the Salem Public Library, but one gentleman had a hard question for the governor:

Patrick mentioned 1,000 state layoffs, out of 30,000 state workers.  This doesn’t sound like a big layoff, unless, as the governor points out, one of the layoffs is someone at the RMV who’s not available to take your call.

Or your caseworker.  1,000 layoffs is small only if you expect state workers are just numbers.

Deval handled this politely, but as I said last fall during the Question One debate, I’m not so tolerant of the Barbara Anderson viewpoint as I used to be.

Months and months of screaming on the Salem News comment pages destroys one’s tolerance for “fire the hacks!”  (except for “my elected hack”, or “my state job”.)

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