To the Editor:

This week the book fair has returned to school. I love the annual book sale in summer at Reed. These are wonderful opportunities to promote reading for our children. I have some interesting reading to recommend to Newtown taxpayers. Did you know that Pat Llodra signed a labor agreement on 7/19/14 with the Parks and Rec union to pay them 15 percent more over three years? It’s right there on page 16 of the union contract. That’s a nice raise for a municipal employee, for any employee. You might not have known that such a contract existed or the timing of its renewal. I recently requested that town and school officials place links to these contracts on their websites, like most other towns, to increase the transparency of labor agreements. Here are the links to those websites, under the human resources departments of the Town and BOE.

http://www.newtown-ct.gov/Public_Documents/NewtownCT_HR/Collective%20Bargaining%20Agreements/

http://www.newtown.k12.ct.us/Departments/HumanResources/tabid/5661/Default.aspx

People who vote on the budgets should be well versed in the contents of these agreements. We deserve to know how they are spending our taxes at a rate in excess of $9 million per month. I had never seen them before. What’s in them? How do you feel about the substance of the contracts signed on your behalf? A big question for me is: How do these negotiators gauge success? And by the way, who are these negotiators? The answers elude me. To compare the contents to other towns, you simply go to their websites, to find similar documents. For teachers, there is a statewide website, which is very convenient to use to compare contracts by town, It’s http://teachercontracts.conncan.org

  I guess when it comes to parks and rec in 2014, a 15 percent pay increase is how Pat gauges success.

Actually, if you read the text of the contract, it uses “1.9% increase each year” language. But then it throws in a $1,325 cash payment on top of that each year. That’s odd. Why use language of 1.9 percent, only to more than double that with a cash payment? Could it be so you could tell your constituents that you “held the line” with a less than two percent annual raise? That’s far from the truth, and certainly not something we expect from our elected officials…we’re nicer in Newtown. I’m not highlighting Parks and Rec for any reason other than of the 11 contracts posted on the two sites, it is some of the oddest language I found. And it’s recent. The raise seemed unusually high relative to others. Maybe the answer is, Newtown was paying their parks and rec team less than other towns, and was losing employees due to the competitive nature of the free labor market.  Who knows? How will other town employees view this raise when their contract is up for renewal? Read the documents. Become familiar with them. Ask questions. Why do you think, in 2014, I had to ask to have these documents added to the website?

Mark Mattioli

67 Great Ring Road, Sandy Hook  November 12, 2014