Just a few requests before taking office
Coda
Greg Bean

You’ve got to give Jun Choi, Edison’s mayor-elect, credit for having chutzpah. Newcomer Choi used a guy in a chicken suit to oust Democratic Mayor George Spadoro in the primary, and he won the general election against independent William Stephens by a very small margin.

And what was Choi’s first order of business, before he even takes the oath of office?

He asked for a raise.

(!)

A couple of weeks ago, Choi approached some members of the Edison Township Council with a few requests.

First, he wanted the city to shell out around $25,000 a month, for up to nine months, to pay for his transition team. Second, he wanted health benefits, something the mayor in that community has never received. And third, because he said he is going to be a full-time mayor, he reportedly wanted his compensation almost doubled — to between $85,000 and $90,000 a year.

Needless to say, the request took lots of people by surprise, but after some initial bemusement, the council last week granted the requests for health benefits and transition team costs. The salary hike is apparently off the table, at least for the time being.

This election was so close, you have to wonder if Choi would be getting ready to take office this January if he had bothered to mention his first priorities at any time during the campaign. And if you think about it, you have to conclude that enough Edison voters would likely have said “to heck with that” and voted William Stephens into office instead.

Now they’ve got Jun Choi, who is unhappy with his terms of employment before he works a single day.

I guess you can get away with this kind of thing in politics, where once you’re voted in you’ve got a measure of job security, at least until the next election or until someone gets so mad that they start a recall movement.

But it would certainly never fly in the private sector.

Can you just imagine what would happen, say at Ace Widgets and Thingamajigs, if the guy who’d been interviewing for and aggressively pursuing the position of sales manager, had been offered the job and given a starting date by the company owner. But a short time before the new sales manager was scheduled to start, he dropped by the owner’s office with a couple of requests.

That conversation would probably go something like this:

“Good morning, Mr. Smith,” the company owner might say. “I sure am glad we’ll be having you aboard. Everybody is really excited about it.”

“I’m excited about it too, Mr. Jones,” the soon-to-be new manager might say. “A lot of things are screwed up around here, and before I start, I’m going to need a few things we didn’t talk about in the interviews.”

“Like what?” Mr. Jones might say.

“Well, first of all, I’m going to need a few assistants to help me get a feel for what needs to be done before I start making changes. I might need them for eight or nine months, and I’d like to pay them $25,000 a month.”

“What?”

“And that’s not all,” Mr. Smith might say. “I’m going to need a health benefits package, even though nobody else around here gets one. I might get sick.”

“Assistants? At $25,000 a month? And a benefits package?”

“Right.”

“It’s funny you mention getting sick. I’m feeling a little funky myself,” Mr. Jones might say. “Is that all?”

“Not quite,” Mr. Smith might say. “I know we discussed compensation while we were interviewing, and I know that before you offered me the job, I might have given the impression the compensation was acceptable. But I’ve now decided that since I plan to work a lot more than the last guy, I’d like about twice the pay.”

“Twice the pay?”

“Well, almost.”

“Is there anything else?”

“No, that’s it, at least for now.”

The owner of the company would consider these requests for about two seconds. Then he’d pick up the phone.

“Get security,” he’d tell the receptionist at the front desk. “There’s a crazy person in my office. Tell them to bring Mace, and maybe the dog.”

And if you doubt that’s how it would happen, you haven’t spent much time in the private sector.

As I said, Jun Choi has chutzpah. But let’s just hope someone on this transition team knows something about building good public relations.

I have a feeling the new mayor is gonna need it.

•••

I’ve been writing columns for a lot of years now, and it was my tradition in years past, in my last column of the year, to reprint a poem about Christmas written by an old cowboy friend of mine.

This year, however, with all the controversy over whether we should say something as harmless as “Merry Christmas” for fear of offending someone, or saying “Happy Holidays” for fear of offending someone else, I’ll forgo the Christmas poem. Instead, I’ll share this year-end greeting from an old mountain man, who had spent a long and hard year trapping beaver, to a few of his friends.

I don’t know the name of the original author, or I’d give him credit.

WELL SIR,

The past year in the Rocky Mountains has been of a customary nature ...

The Bannocks stole my traps ...

Met a grizzly that took half my ear ...

Blackfoot shot my partner ...

Went through the ice on the Gallatin, froze my toes and wet my powder ...

The ’Rapahoes stole my cache of plews ...

Lost my mules to the current on the Henry’s Fork ...

The Ree took to give me a musket ball in the thigh ...

Broke through the limestone crust and boiled my horse on the Yallerstone ...

And beaver’s gettin scarce ...

But THANK GOD I ain’t in Saint Louie!

•••

I don’t know what kind of year you’ve had, but that sure puts the one I had in better perspective.

Thanks for reading and Season’s Greetings. May the road rise up to meet you in the new year.

Gregory Bean is executive editor of Greater Media Newspapers.