Ed, I’m calling about L.A. Parker’s article about the Trenton recreation department not doing a good job. He needs to understand it’s not that we don’t care, we are down 13 positions and working with a skeleton crew. It makes it hard for us to keep up the parks, baseball and soccer fields because we’re short-handed. The union and City Hall refuse to fill these jobs, so the grass starts growing higher, garbage starts piling up. We’ve got 10 guys doing work formerly done by 20 guys; we are over-worked and burned. They can’t expect the same job performance, even though we’re working at our max. City Hall is thinking of cutting us down even more. We’re running the pools on a tight budget because Palmer doesn’t want to let money go. They always complain they don’t have money, but if you go down to City Hall you’ll see that every bigwig has a brand-new hybrid car, and part-timers are making $100,000-something a year. Forget pool fees; they should be cutting back in City Hall, especially hybrid cars. Use that money for the pools and to repair parks. How can we do our repairs when our budget is cut and they don’t want to hire, yet they’re buying new cars for City Hall. That’s something you need to investigate.

Burned

L.A. wasn’t criticizing the average guy trying to do the job. He was pointing out a problem with prioritizing issues that make a difference if we’re looking at the long-term health of youth in this city, and thus the long-term health of the city. — Ed. Note