Gray Snow Mold

Town Annual Meeting tonight.  I'd planned to go to ask about the progress on taking over Zoning but had been reminded at the last town meeting that it had been quite awhile since any of the elected officials had a salary raise.  Got on-line and checked the minutes from the last 10 annual meetings.  I was pretty sure that salaries had to be set at a meeting of the electorate like a spring Annual or autumn Budget meeting.  Didn't see anything in those minutes.  Happy to see that the monthly financial reports are on the website also so checked back as far as I could and, while check amounts varied depending on extra meetings or work that the officials had performed, it was obvious that the base amounts hadn't been changing.  Then I sent out requests to 10 of the towns within our county and near us asking what they paid their chairman, supervisors, clerks, and treasurers.  Here is where I couldn't resist running an experiment.  I just asked that question, signed off w/ "Thank you in advance," and my full name which is also in my e-mail address.  Elected official's salary is public information so each town clerk should respond w/ the amounts.  Only one did.  The rest asked who I was, why did I want to know, and one surprisingly wanted to know the population of where I lived.  Figured I wouldn't push the issue of open information and just answered truthfully that  the town of Atlanta was interested in changing the salaries of our elected officials and wanted to know what other towns were paying.  That was usually enough to get a response w/ the amounts requested.  Brought up salaries at the meeting tonight - if I hadn't probably someone else would have.   Looks better in the minutes though that it was me.  I was the only one in attendence tonight who wasn't an elected official or spouse of one.  Like I've said before, unless people are upset about something, they don't attend town meetings.  (Someone did mention tonight that if I had so much free time to do this research maybe I should get a job.)