Since I have a full time job, as a vice president for mid sized company, the sizzling $10,000 a year does not keep my daughter in clothes let alone anything else. So Saturday is a big mayor day, I was up and working through the 3 newspapers that cover the area. Then it was off to breakfast with a local community activist for breakfast to discuss his needs for money for a low powered bandwidth community radio station. They need between 30 and $80,000 to get it up and running, so of course they want my developers to cough up. However leverage in some cases is gone but who can tell him that, he wants money. I can probaly raise $5,000 for him this year, not so sure what I can do in the future however, because I hit the same sources for others.

Next stop is one of the High Schools where our police department is testing today, 85 applicants, 65 showed up, 43 were left when the physical test was over. The physical test was bench press 60% of your weight, do 10 sit ups, touch your toes, and lastly run 1.5 miles in about 15 minutes (depends on age) I challenged one of the alderman who was there to do the first 3, I was able to do all three, the toe touch was the hardest. (Sadly the alderman was able to do it as well) Pleading prior commitment I declined to die of a coronary in the run.

I then dashed off to the town hall to meet with my director of finance to discuss what we are going to file as our assessed valuation for next years tax role. We built over 900 homes last year in the town at an average cost of $200,000, which added to the average EAV growth of 4% should make the calculation easy, but the state throws some curve balls in its goofy way of doing things, which since we end up estimating a $50 million dollar growth costs us $15 million in EAV. Even estimating a $50 million dollar growth figure the village revenue will grow 30%. Last year was 24% and the year before was 25% so we are growing even faster.

Racing back with 30 minutes before next appointment to police testing to see that we had 5 women, 6 minorities left of the 43 left who were taking the written exam. I was pleased, because when I was elected we had 16 officers all white males, we now have two women on the this years objective is minority and female. The problem is that testing is objective and score based so you got to hope! No mayoral manipulations or as one of my detractors call me "the Puppet Master."

Next stop the Barber shop, where I get abused by the barber and the old timers in there about virtually everything that happens in the community since the last haircut. I locked up these old boys as voters long ago, so my mouth is in full attack mode, which is fun since you usually can't mouth off in public.

Then its off to a ribbon cutting, which is always fun and we now have a new subway shop in town, being on the Atkins Diet I declined an opening sandwich however.