East St. Louis you’re about to get that much worse.
Layoff notices have already gone out in East St. Louis, and 16 police officers could be gone as of January first.
The mayor says these layoffs are needed in order to get the city budget under control.
Budget issues are totally important, but maybe…maybe the police aren’t where we’d make the cuts seeing as though you’ve got people stealing church vans and smashing them in to ATMs the same day this all was announced.
To his credit, East St. Louis mayor Alvin Parks Jr., has said that he would be will to cut his salary in half to save some of those jobs. Other tactics taken by the mayor to keep these policemen on duty is to continually not show up for meetings between city and police officials where the budget would be talked about. Very smooth, but I think they are on to your game Mayor Parks.
“They mayor is not here, has not made a proposal to us except through the press, which I think is unprofessional. We had come to a rescheduled meeting from Friday that had been cancelled due to a lack of quorum. We were told to come to a meeting here today. This meeting got cancelled apparently without our notification,” says Fraternal Order of Police representative Bill Mehrtens.
A final decision on the matter is expected Thursday.
Frankly all of this would be a lot less important to us if we all just collectively started referring to East St. Louis as “West Chicago”.
via KSDK