George,

Our representatives gave us some very nice, polite, publicly acceptable and politically correct responses to the questions posed on Friday, including my question on the funding of the pay plan. I am grateful for their awareness and concern. They seem like nice guys and they are, but talk about funding the pay plan is hyperbole; truth is, there was never any intention of funding the pay plan and that decision was probably made long before the no car tax scheme.

The "No Pay Plan" adopted for state employees is a modified broad banding scheme. One human resources officer said that you can use broad banding to run a flat organization, or you can use it to flatten an organization. It was the intention from the beginning to use it to strip employees of their rights, dignity and just compensation for their effort.

There is a love-hate relationship between the general public and public service. People want the roads salted, sanded and cleared by rush hour, but they make jokes about three guys in white hats watching a fourth shovel silly putty into a pot hole. People want their kids to get a gold plated education but continually vote to keep Virginia near the bottom in educational funding. People want quick smiling service at DMV or the ABC store, but groan when public employees talk about money or fair treatment. People want fire, police and rescue squad or ambulance when they pick up that phone, coupled with the best health care at the end of that ride to the hospital.

While it may be true that the house and senate contain one or two dolts, the governor has the ability to surrond himself with the best and brightest conniving like minds. Convince me that surronded by all this brain power, going from record surplus to record boondogle was unforseen. Is this all our best and brightest can do? "The recent economic slowdown was one of the most widely forecast events in recent budget history". ( Paul Goldman, Wasington Post, December 16, 2000)

Grover Norquest, one of the President's advisors is on record as saying, "My goal is to cut government in half in twenty five years, to get it down to the size where we can drown it in a bathtub". The universal conservative goal is the same.

How can you get something so small you can drown in in a bathtub, a la Andrea Yates? Stop feeding it.

Under the guise of benevolently giving money back to the tax payers and under a convoluted unfunded pay plan for state employees, stop funding public service. Cut taxes in the face of the probability of a down turn in the economy. And it shall come to pass that the size of Virginia government must be slashed - by a Democrat governor. That is why Jim is smiling behind that tax limit sign in the Richmond Times Dispatach. He has met his hidden agenda and more.

But the next time a plane plows into a building, or if someone explodes a "dirty" bomb in a ship in Norfolk harbor, or even if you just pick up the phone and dial 911 and there is no answer, you might think of public service as lying dead in the bottom of Grover Norquest's bathtub.

Wilson McIvor (January 7, 2002)