In case you missed it | Let them eat nothing

0

 

 

Let them eat nothing

Food for the state’s neediest children. You’d think it’s a cause lawmakers from both parties could rally around. Alas, no. In a party-line vote, members of the Colorado Joint Budget Committee ( JBC) rejected additional funding for Smart Start, a state program run by the Colorado Department of Education that provides free breakfast for children from families that live below the poverty line. Because the number of Colorado families living in hardship has increased, the department requested an additional $124,000 to keep the program fully funded through the end of the school year.

But Sens. Kent Lambert, Cheri Gerou and Jon Becker, all Republicans, voted against the additional dollars, purportedly because the state is broke and just can’t afford it. As a result, poor families will have to pay 30 cents per meal for food they’ve been getting for free. That’s $1.50 per week per child — a significant financial blow for parents already struggling to provide shelter, food and clothing for their children.

“As a family guy myself with children and grandchildren, I take a very strong responsibility to earn money to feed my own family,” Lambert told The Denver Post.

Is Lambert saying that poor parents don’t take feeding and caring for their children seriously?

There’s nothing like listening to a privileged white man tell us how he skillfully handles all the hardships of life.

Although it’s true that Colorado is financially strapped, we shouldn’t balance the budget by taking food from the mouths of poor children.

Check out CU salaries

Ever wondered how much the muckety-mucks at CU make? Well, we stumbled across a handy website that is quite illuminating when it comes to salaries at the university.

It can be found at www.cusys.edu/budget/cusalaries, and while it doesn’t have people’s names, it carries their titles, so you can figure out who’s who pretty easily. The nice thing about the site is that you can choose to view only positions that earn more than $100,000 a year.

A few years ago The Denver Post upset CU employees when it had the gall to post a searchable database of the (primarily tax-funded) salaries of state workers on its website. Why the outrage about airing this public information? Geez, it’s almost like they don’t want us to know how well many of them are paid. And it creates salary envy when the peons at CU see how much some of the more incompetent university administrators make.

Here are a few basic observations about this online database, taken completely out of context. At CU-Boulder, 675 of the 6,851 positions, or about 10 percent, collect more than 100 grand a year. Many of these jobs are probably held by faculty who are excellent and require compensation at the market level to avoid being lured away to another university. Many are paid, at least in part, with research dollars and donations.

The stats for the CU system offices are a bit harder to justify. These include the president’s office and departments that serve the whole CU system, like the payroll and benefits office. Here, 60 of the 367 jobs, or about 16 percent, make more than $100,000 annually. These must be really good administrators who are in danger of being lured away to another university, right?

Meanwhile, tuition continues to rise and budgets continue to get cut. Draw your own conclusions.

Respond: letters@boulderweekly.com