Hey, Waynesboro: There’s actually a cost to being cheap

Example #4,080 of how Waynesboro is cheap: we’re so short of sanitation workers that we may not be able to plow snow.

Good thing there’s climate change, huh?

Waynesboro’s human resources director, Nichole Nicholson, painted the troubling picture for city leaders at a Waynesboro City Council retreat this week.

Apparently, a generation of limited government is threatening basic service and public safety in our fair city.

We’ve long since been paying to train newbie police officers to learn on the job, only to see them move to better-paying neighboring communities once they figure out the right side of the law.

Now we’re falling way behind on public works. Nicholson told City Council that we’re paying our sanitation workers $11 an hour; Staunton, a few miles to our west, pays $17.

And that’s not factoring in that you can make $13 or $14 an hour flipping burgers, making sandwiches or pouring designer coffee, which doesn’t involve garbage, digging water lines, plowing slow all hours of the day and night.

I’m not meaning to be hard on City Council here; they’re just doing what the people who voted them into office told them to do.

Be cheap.

There’s a cost to being cheap, you know.

Remember that next time it snows, and the streets aren’t clear for days.

Story by Chris Graham