Easy way to save taxpayer dollars

With local, county and state governments struggling to balance their budgets, everyone is looking for ways to save a few dollars.

The Intelligencer of Doylestown has an easy way for Bucks County taxpayers to save $40,000 a year -- eliminate the two elected jury commissioners.

The same concept could be applied to all of Pennsylvania's 67 counties.

From an editorial in The Intelligencer:

For years, we've been harping on the fact that the county employs two elected jury commissioners, one Republican and one Democrat, to do virtually nothing. The cost for each of the patronage positions is over $19,600 a year in salary, plus benefits. These two positions are holdovers from the days when jury commissioners actually had to compile lists of potential jurors manually. Now, that task is done faster and more efficiently by computers.

So like the guys who once had to go out each evening and light all the gas lamps by hand, jury commissioners have been made obsolete by technology. Yet every year the county budget includes a line item for jury commissioner funding. Why?

Read the full editorial at the newspaper's Web site.

Originally posted at TONY PHYRILLAS