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No, this is not a story about someone getting younger. This is a story about a curious state senator who lives high on the taxpayer hog, yet makes false, unfounded, unsubstantiated claims.
What is so curious is that taxpayer funded Sen. Jim Peterson is posting false claims on the republican legislator blog about state employees.
Facts can be a curious thing to someone who is a state employee and one of the highest paid state employees in Montana at that. Montana State University paid Sen. Jim Peterson around $120,000 per year to sit on his farm in Buffalo with no known job duties, no grant application, or any research reports on record. That is more per year than the any state official I know, including the Governor.
Besides the obvious conflict of interest of a MSU Ag. Department employee on sabbatical passing a $1,000,000 amendment to increase funding for MSU Ag. Extension Services as a member of the Appropriations Joint Subcommittee on Education. Sen. Jim Peterson only told the other members that he was no longer receiving payment from the MSU Ag. Department during his 4 months of legislative duty minutes before pushing through the $1,000,000 expansion.
If that wasn't enough to warrant a stringent corruption investigation similar to the insider pay-offs associated with University of Missoula's INSA program or the latest Montana State University defunct Joe Skeen cash cow scheme. Sen. Jim Peterson, a state employee himself, has the audacity to make false claims about state employment levels.
During the 2005 Legislative Session then House Member Jim Peterson and his colleagues passed SB 146 to transfer every Public Defender in Montana from being county employees to the state. The bill received the vote and full support of Peterson.
So, the average annual increase of state employees under the Martz Administration was 1.2% per year, curiously enough the exact same percentage, 1.2%, as Schweitzer. It was the legislatively mandated transfer of the Public Defenders office to the State of Montana that boosted numbers close to what Peterson claims.
For someone who is feeding from the taxpayer trough and culpable to any expansion of government, Sen. Peterson should not be so curiously lose with the numbers and should be accountable to the people of Montana for his own $120,000 taxpayer generated pay check. |
