January 11, 2014

Dear Sir,

While I can understand why some people, particularly private sector workers, may want to reduce the number of government employees by any means possible, as they are not seen to be suffering sufficiently in our current economic demise, I was gob smacked when I went to the Lois Browne Evans Building and found three security guards and a metal detector installed at the entrance.

I know that the Department of Planning isn’t everybody’s favourite but when has a planner been threatened with a knife or gun. For that matter when has any non-uniform government employee ever been threatened with a knife or gun when carrying out their duties in their toasty warm or overly air-conditioned offices?

Civil Servants the world over enjoy spending taxpayers money and from my own experience they are not too fussed about making logical cost effective choices or defending their questionable decisions. It’s not their money, right!

It is also not our tax money anymore; we borrow it from foreign entities that are digging their claws deeper and deeper into Bermuda’s flesh. How much is it costing to provide “security” at this government building?

Not just the salaries of the three officers, the purchase or rental of the equipment but the time lost every single occasion that a government employee or working visitor enters that building.

How many more of these “security” set-ups have been established? What is Government overall paying for “security”?

The OBA was voted in to reign in the ridiculously high cost of paying our overstaffed, under worked and pampered government employees. They don’t seem to be doing a particularly good job so far. We need most of the non-essential government employees to be put on three or four day weeks until such time as the OBA can balance costs with income and have a working plan in place to pay off the debt over 15 to 20 years.

If the government employees within the LBE building fear for their lives then let them club together and pay for the security themselves, why should I pay even one more hard to earn tax dollar to make government employees think they are safe.

My best assessment is that if anybody showed up with a pointed wooden stick the security staff would all run for their lives and leave their government employee charges cowering under their desks.

There has to be a better way of spending our meagre resources

Being robbed of a future