Hacker News Reader

Comment by aahortwwy | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if supervisor compensation can be determined for the current year without a quorum of auditors?

There's a (small) chance none of them are compensated. My municipality is all volunteer.

There's an enormous chance none of them are compensated. The township is in the middle of rural PA and has a population of like 17K. I would be astounded if any of the supervisors are compensated.

They are compensated. They get the max they are allowed under state law.

"the compensation for each Supervisor is hereby set at $3,250 per annum"

That isn't much different from being uncompensated.

Most Americans make less than $35k a year. This amount could be substantial to some people.

Well, you'd have to work out how much the pay is on an hourly basis. It doesn't sound like a role that consists of nothing but collecting a stipend.

But more broadly, there's an active debate over whether governmental posts should either (a) pay enough that someone could live off of one; or (b) require the person holding the post to have independent means. This is clearly on the (b) side, often felt to exclude many social classes from being able to hold a post in the government. (And sometimes invoked as a reason to overlook corruption by the officeholder - "how else are they supposed to support themselves?")

These generally aren't full time positions and the meetings happen in the evenings. It's possible to have a job and hold office.

This is blatantly false - if you work second or third shift, you cannot hold these titles.

Does that make any e.g. factory worker ineligible for titles? You might say to yourself 'but you don't want factory workers im office' - and then you'd be saying that some classes are worth more than others, that these are 'second class' citizens in the eyes of the law.

And that would be a pretty disgusting viewpoint.

If you can hold a job or make money, perhaps you should make nothing from the position, otherwise there should probably be a living wage stipulation.

Most Americans make more than $35k.

Median income is $42k.

https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-p...

I wonder where this discrepancy is coming from.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

The St Louis Fed website also shows census.gov as the source. Perhaps one statistic is including people who do not work such as old people and the other is not?

That graph is CPI-U-RS adjusted which means it's tracking spending power not actual dollars paid. You want "current dollars" not "adjusted dollars"

It's not in the middle of rural PA, it's suburbs of the state capital. The population is low because the Carlisle Pike shopping district runs through most of it. Source: I grew up there.

They are compensated. I was also on a council at one point, not even 30 minutes from Silver Spring, with a population of less than 3,000. I had 802 constituents. We were paid $50/mo., which calculated out to about $3/hour with the lengths of the various meetings.

2 is a quorum, so he and the guy he talked too could do it. Maybe not this year, but next year.

I didn't go look up the rule listed there, it might be pretty narrow.

Surely that's an incentive for the supervisors to swear in a quorum of auditors? Otherwise who's going to determine their compensation?

The email says they have no supervisors.

Ah, you're right. I got confused because the township managers were incorrectly referred to as "supervisors" earlier in the Twitter thread.

It says they have no supervisor _working for the township_. They do have at least two supervisors that were just sworn in for 6 years according to the meeting agenda posted before. I guess that means they are fulfilling their duties uncompensated and thus no compensation needs to be determined.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com