David Bergin:

Dan,
I’m very thankful for you, your help regarding the City of Trenton, your dedication. Regarding the Budget Survey, I received it from Jim Carlucci and forwarded it to the Island Civic Association e-mail group. However, I didn’t complete it myself. I realized that my interests and goals are not related so much to the arrangement of funds, but the quality of performance in each department and by each individual working in the city government. That is to say, having lived in Trenton for many years and gotten to know the government very well, it’s become well-established that the dollars spent on an enterprise, department or functional area and the result of that spending is not a relationship that’s linear. There are many examples. The point is that budteting more more money for the school board does not necessarily give you more and better education. That’s been empirically and historically proven, abunantly clearly, in particular in Trenton. If, when an enterprise is hugely mismanaged, with money wasted, with corruption and hugely poor performance by highly paid employees, it seems ironic to have a budget exercise in which one says “Education is important — let’s keep the funding for that.”, when we should be going over ther and firing highly paid administrators who do very poor work, or little or no work, and replace them with fewer and better employees who will provide a good school system for our children. I’m for more and better education. I just not for throwing more and more money down a rat-hole. What’s needed is strong leadership to break the back of the corrupt machine political system.

Joseph Bullock:

Thanks for your interest in this city. My mother was born, raised, and passed here. She used to tell me about life here when she was growing up (she was born in 1927) and how the downtown area was the heart of the city. I am a union carpenter who recently worked for the
Trenton Board of Education. As I traveled through the city working on the various schools, I counldn’t help but notice the many, many boarded up houses throughout the city. In my unofficial opinion this has to be the most dilapidated looking state capital in the country. I agree that not much has been done in this city for a long time and apparently the current city council either isn’t capable or willing to change the status quo.