Govt for the 21st century

Thanks for all the great comments in the last post! It's terrific to see some serious discussion of downtown issues.

PI is still around town, but as I understand, he's pretty busy with work stuff. I hope he'll be back on the keyboards soon.

I've been scratching my head over here, trying to figure out what the heck has been going on all these years with the Essex Retirement Board. (And all the city retirement boards, for that matter.) Would it not make sense for all the cities and towns to band together and manage their funds cooperatively?

As I see it, there is some clerical/accounting work to be done to take applications, issue checks, keep records and the like. Then, at a higher level, there are investment decisions to make about how to balance reasonable returns with moderate risk. Peabody has a retirement board (volunteer?) and a couple of bookkeeper-types (paid staff). I don't think investment decisions are made locally, although I may be incorrect. Then, there's a whole administrative apparatus in Boston (state-level) that oversees all the local stuff to some degree too.

Not that everything is always better if centralized (my experience with state bureaucrats hasn't been too impressive), but still....Shouldn't we be looking for ways to consolidate and share services wherever possible? A lot of our government structure is "because it's always been that way." Now might be a good time to take a fresh look at what is truly necessary in the 21st century.