Community Commentary:

Regarding Herbert Molano’s latest diatribe (“Salaries merit discussion,” May 5), when is enough enough? The same old logic propounded by him for his failed candidates and rejected by the voters still clouds his rhetoric.

He alleges that the pay scale for Glendale police and firefighters is far and above that paid by other cities. Every time, Molano asks this question and has been answered, endlessly, by the city manager and both police and fire that their pay scale is in the mid-range. All have explained that in order to retain personnel, not just train and have those personnel leave for employment elsewhere, Glendale has to be competitive and is constantly comparing salaries with other cities.

As a Tujunga resident, Molano is well within his rights to ask the city of Los Angeles to compare and contrast the pay scales of all Los Angeles city departments, but it’s galling to ask a neighboring city to do the same. We would be more than broke if every nonresident asked Glendale city departments to have public performance evaluations just for their personal whims. Imagine a call, “Hi, I’m from Hoboken, N.J., can your fire department justify its salaries?” It’s just insane, and yet we tolerate this.

Molano asks about performance review. Every time he is given an answer, but if it does not fit his preconceived notion of what the answer should be, then to him it is not the correct answer.

For example, his preconceived notion that Mayor Frank Quintero or Councilman Ara Najarian should not conduct evaluations of city departments because they won their endorsements and somehow are tainted is just too Machiavellian for me. Who else would you want but our elected officials to do that job? That’s why we elected them! If we can’t trust those we elect, why elect them? The innuendo is that we are all too stupid, because we did not elect Molano’s “trustworthy” candidates.