Sunday, May 16, 2010 It is that time of year again, and my favorite Reporter column is published again. Each year a painstaking amount of effort is refined presented on a few full pages of the paper - worth the tree matter. The effort is the "Survey of Top Public Servant's Pay", otherwise known as the Salary Survey. The compensation packages of public officials across all forms of government are tallied for the public to review. Like clockwork, the reactions abound, editorials, opinion pages, blogs, forums, and now facebook and twitter chatter. Simply, the survey shows scores of $100,000+ salary packages for public servants - which in itself Is not inherently an issue. However, I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that "what?!" regarding the amount of salaries only follows the initial "huh?", in terms of oh, I didn't know of that department, what do they do? Awareness of local governance structure is not typically part of a high school civics course, and most people don't stumble upon informative community seminars that discuss this, and even less actually have the time to seek out and learn about the complexities of government. One word with so many connotations and realities. There are more than 38,000 high-level public jurisdictions in the United States - each with its own Code of law (or variant thereof), its own agencies, governing bodies, public officials, and therefore required expenses and tax-levying authorities. http://thereporter.com/salarysurvey