I wish someone would explain to me how we can afford in these very difficult times to pay our new City Manager $174,000 a year when we can’t even afford to keep trash cans in our park because we don’t even have employees to pick it up. From what I hear from a reliable source we let half of the kids go who worked over the summer picking these up, etc. because we couldn’t afford their part-time salaries of $9 per hour. Do we have our priorities a little confused or is my thinking confused?

Patty Tucker, Kirkland