However, I wanted to put Mayor Scott Johnson's response to the Compliance and Communication Plan (memo, suggestion, whatever we're calling it now) from the SSHA. If you recall, I hadn't heard from him when I wrote the last story about it, but of course I hear from him the day after the story ran.

He got back to me June 28 (Thursday). He was out on Monday and Tuesday and didn't get the letter until Wednesday, which is why I hadn't heard from him.

*Also, as an aside, I never published a blog post that I wrote a week ago. I just published it. It's about Ed Spychalski's salary, if anyone still cares, but it published in the order it would have originally appeared. You can find it here.

So the SSHA's response, in the words of John Franck, basically "flipped (the City Council) the bird." It covered topics high and low (though I won't get into the author's recollection of how the bedbug controversy, executive director's salary and general operation of the SSHA actually worked), but it declined to address the approval process for employe salaries (about half of what the City Council asked them to address).

Mayor Johnson, though, wasn't surprised.

"I almost expected that kind of a response," he said. "The request was essentially asking them to admit they were wrong."

Just for a (really) quick recap, state law requires that the SSHA submit its employee salaries to the City Council for approval. The SSHA hasn't done it in more than a decade. The city Council asked them to — all of them since they stopped. That, Johnson said, was one of the problems he saw with the "request or demand" that the Council issued.

However, he said he expects the issue to be addressed in the audit being conducted by the State Comptroller's office — or at least the process which the SSHA used to come to the executive director's $152k compensation in 2011.

With that, I will wash my hands of the SSHA news... until the next scandal.

Stay classy Saratoga.