GilfordGrok

I guess Non-Profits no longer mean "low wages".  From Instapundit (emphasis mine):

YESTERDAY I MENTIONED THE GROWTH OF THE NONPROFIT SECTOR, and reader Toren Smith sends this story as a followup: Bay Area nonprofit executives rack up big salary gains:

Laurance Hoagland, chief investment officer of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, had the biggest paycheck in 2003 with a total of $738,094. Though that represents a 54 percent jump in cash compensation for Hoagland, it included a $215,000 retention bonus paid that year. Without that bonus, Hoagland would have ranked second on The List, earning exactly $1 less than the $523,095 paid to Richard Schlosberg, president of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

The San Francisco Business Times annual compensation survey of nonprofits and foundations found that 23 of the top 50 executives enjoyed double-digit compensation increases in their most recently available fiscal year. The survey is based on nonprofit's tax returns, which are publicly disclosed. The Business Times survey excludes hospitals and research institutes. . . . The San Francisco Symphony's musical director, Michael Tilson Thomas, does not appear on the list because he provides his services through a $1.5 million annual contract between the symphony and his corporation, MTT Inc. That's up from $1.4 million in 2002.

No starving artist, he. The nonprofit sector is huge and lucrative, but perceptions and scrutiny haven't caught up, though this article suggests that's beginning to change: "Daniel Borochoff, president of the Chicago-based charity watchdog group American Institute of Philanthropy, said there's a lot more scrutiny being paid to nonprofits, including an Internal Revenue Service review of 2,000 nonprofit groups as part of an investigation into compensation of nonprofit executives."

I had brought up the point last week that the non-profits that have been funded are not scrutinized at the local level to the same level as we do our Town departments. 

I was glad to see that the voters had the chance to decide which non-profits / social service organziations / NGOs they would and would not support via the warrant articles on the ballot last year. I think that while I would have rather have seen the NGOs kept on warrants, at least the Selectmen ONLY funded those that were approved.  

That said, I can see a push coming to expand the cost of local government by those agencies that were turned away from the trough. 

Amusingly, the push will be at the Gilford Voters to deliver charity via taxes, and pressure will be applied to both the Selectmen and the BudComm folks to acceed to this.  I really wish that push was to the idividual taxpayer instead.

Unfortunately, we already heard that it is too much trouble to do that....