Even at $10 a day, any Stark Countian who serves as a juror is doing a good deed. So why are they being punished? The STARK COUNTY POLITICAL REPORT believes it is because citizen-jurors are easy targets: people of good will, doing their civic duty and who wouldn’t dream of organizing and taking collective action.The essence of The Repository's report is that the Stark County Court of Common Pleas is, in part, balancing the court’s budget on the backs of sacrificial jurors.
It must be those administrators: Marc Warner (the court administrator) and Mike Hanke (commissioners’ administrator). The STARK COUNTY POLITICAL REPORT lays at right at their doorstep.
Certainly, this taking away of a token payment would not have been the judges’ idea. We read in newspaper report after newspaper report how judges in a concluded jury trial routinely and profusely thank the jury members for serving while acknowledging, at a $10 per day remuneration, they are making a huge sacrifice.
Yes indeed, it must be Warner and Hanke (who are super-bureaucrats because they are managers who create rules [and budgets, if you will] for their underlings apply to the general public). Bureaucrats relish dishing you bad news. “The numbers are the numbers,” they say. It makes their day!
A more long term cause is the stream of county commissioners over the years who have played the “you can have something for nothing” game (e.g. Democrat Pete Ferguson in the current campaign) with Stark County voters. The “something for nothing mentality” is firmly ensconced in Stark County. It is about to become the county’s ruination.
From The Repository report, it is hard to say definitely but the court’s budget must be at least $3.8 million after the 11% reduction. Looking at the graph The Report has prepared, the $75,000 to $80,000 annual cost for jurors is .02 (folks, that two-one hundredth of a per cent) of the $3.8 million.
Now if it were $75,000 to $80,000 being denied to an organization that provides services to the court and the organization has political clout, Warner and Hanke would be singing a different tune. Then it would probably be something like: “We’ll shave $1,000 here, $5,000 there and so on and so forth until they had enough money to continue the $75,000 to $80,000 being preserved for the organization with the political clout.
The Report opposes this move because it symbolically depreciates the good deeds of everyday people doing their best to make Stark County a model of responsible citizenship.
That’s The Report’s take on this issue, what do you think?
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