Sunday, July 19, 2009

Seeing the world in style

It's not only our federal leaders who have a penchant for traveling on our dime. Even local leaders have caught the travel bug. Today's Boston Globe reports on the pension boards for the Town of Plymouth and for Plymouth County. They seem to have a need to attend as many 'industry' conferences as possible, whether the conferences are on Cape Cod or in Palm Springs. To be fair, they only send a couple of their members to out-of-state conferences. Everybody - board members and staff - goes to the Cape Cod conference. Need I say that this travel is not via Greyhound, nor do they eat at the local McDonald's. Each of the two boards has spent over $100,000 in the past five years on travel. Could their funds have used the money?

Of course, this is not the place to talk about why the state has 106 public retirement boards, one of which has only $7,000,000 in assets. That's a topic for another day.

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