Friday, March 30, 2012

Bye-bye, Ms. Lauren I

So long, Hayes, Garnier, Smith, and Vaughan.

After a lot of sturm and drang; misplaced outrage; and claims of not knowing what they were doing (which is partly correct…at least for some members) Trenton’s city council last week adopted a budget for FY2012 that reduced the salary line for the staff of the mayor’s office.  This line item reduction means that the mayor has to find a way to spread the remaining money around to pay his aides, secretary etc or let some of them go effective today. This would include the Mayor’s Director of Policy and Communication, Lauren Ira.

As much as we would like to comment on this situation, it is not our policy to discuss personnel matters publicly.

6 comments:

Lamberton Lilly said...

This will give Ms. Ira time to take creative writing/journalism courses. And, too, a course in basic English.

Anonymous said...

Great...Now the whole city will fall apart....OMG...I fear for our safety too. I guess we don't need to pay ANYBODY $80,000 per year to say "We cannot comment at this time". Good riddance.

Anonymous said...

Good riddance. Another step in the very long process of taking Trenton back from Tony Mack.

Anonymous said...

Lauren Ira: Proof that a Bachelor's Degree in Professional Writing & Journalism really is just a worthless piece of paper.

I think I know a way for Ms. Ira to make some money: The College of New Jersey can pay her a stipend to refrain from telling anyone she ever set foot on its campus.

Anonymous said...

Lauren is my classmate and a very intelligent woman. She works full-time and studies at night.

She worked for a crook, however we shouldn't defame and chastise her for this unless we know for certain she had a hand in it (which I sincerely doubt).

I'm all for holding pulic officials accountable, but leave the staff out of it - they are just doing the jobs they were hired to do. You would probably do the same.

Old Mill Hill said...

Being loyal to friends is nice trait. However, you are overlooking that Ms. Ira was paid, and well, to do a job. She was to shape the communications coming from the Mack administration.

The quality of writing that was exhibited over Ms. Ira's tenure with the city was nothing short of horrible. If she was responsible for the creation of some of those press releases, she needs to go back to school to learn some basic grammar and sentence construction.

If she was handed something already written and couldn't clean it up to meet the most basic standards of the English language, then she was being overpaid.

The long and the short of it is that Ms. Ira added nothing to the betterment of the city of Trenton in either the policy or the communication areas. Her tenure showed her to be ineffective, if not unqualified.

She, unfortunately, became the face of a failed administration unable to tell competency from cronyism.