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Mark Guydish
Sunday, January 30, 2000 Page: 20A
I’ll pass on extra helpings of this McGovernment menu I had a Wendy’s lunch
the other day. Despite my rejection of the “Biggie” offer, they gave me
“Biggie” fries. Which raised the question, what do you get when you actually
order the Biggie? Answer: The “Great Biggie.” If you made this stuff up
people wouldn’t believe you. I started wondering, what if government used
similar ploys to give the illusion of bargains? So you want one plowed road
with salt? Is that the Plain Plow or the Biggie Plow? For a dollar more a
mile, it goes to the curb. The fire department could offer the regular hose
or the Biggie hose. It’ll douse the flames in half the time but cost more. You
also can get the Great Biggie hose, powerful enough to knock over buildings
while draining reservoirs. Potholes? We can send the standard patch crew or a
few burly men affectionately dubbed the Crater Killers. Cops already come in
different models, at least in Hazleton, where a call for an officer could
bring a regular cop or the supersized version, our very own armor-plated,
wall-crawling sharpshooters known as the Special Operations Group. We could
call this value-menu meal approach to municipal services McGovernment. Then
again, we’ve had our share of politicians who like to serve up extra helpings
of whatever they’ve got. Problem is, it’s usually not welcome. Right now,
Mayor Lou Barletta and City Council are grappling with former Mayor Mike
Marsicano’s legacy of a Biggie deficit, Biggie depletion of the city Public
Works Department and Great Biggie city union contracts. That last,
incidentally, has left city workers in the middle of a problem they did not
create, having mistakenly bargained with the ex-mayor in “good faith” – two
words that never, ever should be used together in discussing Marsicano.
Council weighed the generous contracts against the city’s red ink and voted
them down Thursday, forcing renegotiations. Former Hazleton Area School Board
President Ken Temborski certainly gave us extra helpings of ethical quagmires,
with the purchase of the district’s old administration building, the
discrepancies in signatures on petitions during his stymied run for district
justice and the “free” boiler deal. The School District handed out
supersized consultant contracts to retirees like free toys in a Happy Meal,
with Bob Heeter and former Business Manager Donald Boyer getting the best
prizes. Boyer, incidentally, had no problem doing consulting work for attorney
Ira Weiss, while the School Board gave Weiss a few jumbo jobs with the
district. There’s the Greatest Super Biggiest of them all, the School Board’s
districtwide building program, Project 2000, with the original price tag of
about $44 million supersized so much it’s actually approaching $100 million,
depending on how you calculate it. And most recently, Hazleton Area High
School football coach John Yaccino started a Biggie controversy while
defending his performance as coach by contending kids were less than
well-behaved before his hard discipline fell on the locker room. Come to
think of it, maybe this McGovernment thing isn’t such a good idea after all.
Oh well. No biggie.
Mark Guydish is Greater Hazleton Editor. Reach him at 459-2005 or e-mail at
markg@leader.net.