CAUT

  • 1.  budget cuts

    Registered Piano Technician
    Posted 12-29-2024 19:38

    Our new president wants to cut the Federal budget. Somewhere along the way, those cuts are going to come down to have an impact on us. Universities and schools are going to be asked to spend less, and one way or another that's going to mean less money for pianos and piano maintenance. This is not a political post, but a realistic position on how important, or not important, our jobs are.

    There have been several posts lately on how many piano tuners are needed to take care of the instruments in a school. We have developed a formula to figure this out. But try as we may, for the most part, schools are not going to fund piano work just because we ask for it. We need to understand that for the "bean counters" our jobs are not as important we think they are.

    We have to come to the realization that we are not going to have the money that is needed to spend on the pianos in the schools we service. We need to start telling department chairs and deans that their pianos are not going to play and sound like they are supposed to because we have not been given the resources to do that. And we need to make sure the faculty and students understand that. By the same token, we need to be honest with ourselves that we only have so much time and money to take care of those instruments. 

    I have worked for my school for 3 years now and have not had an increase in my budget. I am doing my best to keep the pianos in tune, but come the end of the semester, some of the concert instruments are not going to get tuned. This is what will happen when there are going to be budget cuts. My chair has already been informed. My suggestion for you is to do the same. 

    Wim

     



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    Willem "Wim" Blees, RPT
    St. Augustine, FL 32095
    Tnrwim@aol.com
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  • 2.  RE: budget cuts

    Registered Piano Technician
    Posted 12-30-2024 02:04
    Wim wrote: " Somewhere along the way, those cuts are going to come down to have an impact on us. Universities and schools are going to be asked to spend less, and one way or another that's going to mean less money for pianos and piano maintenance."

    Maybe. Over the past couple weeks, I've been doing a deep dive into how schools and colleges are funded. It's a bit too complicated for a post here, but suffice it to say that if they lose federal funding, most colleges / universities have more than sufficient funding available to them through unused and untouched endowments. As in billions on top of their actual revenue from tuition and other charges. Personally, I'm not worried about it. If times get financially tough for the college system, they'll figure out a way to adapt, just like anyone else. 

    As far as getting paid or getting sufficient funding for the piano program, that's an entirely different discussion. But for me personally, I refuse to panic that the universities are going to go under. I could be wrong, and if so time will tell. I just don't see that happening anytime soon. 


    Sincerely,

    Benjamin Sanchez, RPT
    Piano Technician / Artisan
    (256) 947-9999
    www.professional-piano-services.com





  • 3.  RE: budget cuts

    Registered Piano Technician
    Posted 12-30-2024 09:42
    A couple of thoughts: regarding possible impending budget cuts, unless higher ed funding is cut to zero, our portion of an institution's budget is so small that it gets treated, in my experience, like the electrical bill, just something the university has to pay for. Getting MORE money can be another matter, largely dependent on how the tech was hired. An employee gets the same treatment as all other employees, and in a static or declining budget will not receive more pay for the same work; a contractor does write his / her own contract, and small increases can likely fly under the radar. The best way to do that is to change the rate per hour and let them do the math- it simply won't be worth it for the institution to reject the contract. Again, they don't argue with the electric company about what they pay for electricity. 
    If the answer is that there is no money, then say ok, but still,here is the new rate per hour. It will cover fewer hours. Any suggestions on reduction of tunings will be appreciated. That will put the faculty on your side.  After they want THEIR piano to be tuned. If another part of the budget has to be cut a few thousand dollars, but that results in better instruments for rehearsals and concerts, you'll have a building full of friends not enemies. It also will push the faculty to write grants and develop friends of the music school to donate to specific things, which is much better than expecting the institution to print a bunch of money to pay you more. 
    In my case at NIU, as it happens, I have been working for a number of years to bring the contract up to a dollar amount that will ultimately allow them to hire a full time tech when I do hand in the key. I've already retired, which is nice because I get a retirement check and excellent health insurance to supplement Medicare, plus get paid decently for the amount of work I do for them. I also am using my outside contacts to help the piano and other needs for the school of music. As an example, some of my clients are hosting house concerts of our renewed graduate string quartet program, where there is an ask for assistance to fund the program. 
    I'm setting up an opportunity for a harpsichord builder to come, work on our instruments and at same time train some local techs so they can do better work on harpsichords. A client of mine is donating frequent flyer miles to bring him from Portland OR to Dekalb, and the techs will each help pay his per diem for the training they receive. It won't show up anywhere in the NIU budget, but the harpsichords will be in much better shape, plus a local need for better educated techs will be met.
    This summer we'll have a S&S B will be rebuilt with funds from a fund created as an endowment for instrument maintenance, a result of a half million dollar bequest.
    I'm not sharing this to toot my own horn, but to show that good things can happen when you look outside of the institution for help. You can't expect anyone outside the school to understand the practical implications of funding cuts, so " you got some 'splaining to do", but if you try you may be surprised at how generous people can be.
    David Graham
    Graham Piano Service, Inc.
    512 S. Main St.
    Sycamore IL 60178
    815-353-5450







  • 4.  RE: budget cuts

    Registered Piano Technician
    Posted 12-30-2024 11:37
    My budget - including salary, piano replacement, parts, etc. - came from a course fee (per credit hour) attached to all music courses. This was negotiated as a response to a need identified during accreditation - the department put the need in its self-evaluation, and the accreditation team included it as a red flag in its report, meaning it needed to be addressed in order to retain accreditation. The department asked upper administration for money to replace pianos, and as a fallback, for permission to add the course fee. The course fee was approved, and was later increased.

    Thus, as long as there are music students taking classes, the pianos will be taken care of. The piano maintenance program is self-funded. 

    Regards,
    Fred Sturm
    fssturm@comcast
    "The cure for boredom is curiosity, and there is no cure for curiosity." Dorothy Parker






  • 5.  RE: budget cuts

    Registered Piano Technician
    Posted 12-30-2024 12:34
    Fred

    This is an interesting concept. Let me talk to you about it in Waco. 

    Wim





  • 6.  RE: budget cuts

    Registered Piano Technician
    Posted 12-31-2024 08:40

    Dear Wim,

    You've voiced that the incoming president plans spending cuts, and expressed the likelihood of a certain kind of hardship as a result. You've said that it was not a political post to say so, and as far as I know, your post has been allowed to remain. And I'm fine with that.

    However, if you are allowed to write as you did, then I think that I should be allowed to also say the following, without my post being struck down either! As follows:

    "The last president and congress spent beyond their means and beyond what I as a taxpayer could afford. Because of this, I expect to suffer as a piano technician from contraction in the economy due to money being tight for individuals, families and businesses in America."

    I'll add this. This amount of heartache as I've witnessed recent devastation, economic, catastrophic and geopolitical, and considered not only the outlook for my senior years - and what a world in the 2040's and beyond could look like for my children as well - the heartache and concern is considerable to say the least. The whole world is in a lot of trouble right now, there's a lot that is pretty bleak and it's a lot bigger than our one little area of concern. If tides don't change, the future we are handing to our children or grandchildren is really sobering if we are honest. If we find ourselves unwilling to suffer together to fix our mistakes - to fix the mistakes and selfishness more particularly of the older folks who have voted longer than the younger folks - then we are all the more likely to experience much, much greater suffering economically in just a few years.

    Also, if spending cuts happen, they will do so through not only a president that was elected, but by the pen of the congress, which controls the purse. Therefore, in a real sense, it's more accurate to state that spending cuts if they were to happen, would be because the people of this country have in fact this time by majority recognized or felt that they were necessary or wise. This should be a hopeful development since it demonstrates a recognition of something akin to true economic realities by the electorate. What we aren't ready to discuss yet, is how the government's need for year-over-year economic growth in order to survive - is the destructive force that is spreading across the world like cancer and is the driving force of wasteful consumerism of environmentally costly yet short-lived phones, computers, cars, housing and more.

    What the world desperately needs in order for humanity to live happily (at least it would help us a lot), is to recognize that an economic policy from a government - that banks on exponential growth - is what will damage the planet more than anything else. If humanity were not competing on a world stage over different types of governmental and philosophical structures - free and less so and in varying ways (as critical as that really is) as well as the resources to support those pursuits, they could instead peacefully innovate to generate more rational economic output centered around the clever use of science and technology to foster life on the surface of a planet where almost every square inch was formerly in its prime covered with living organisms however microscopic. Apparently as far as we've detected, this is a rare and precious place to live in this particular part of the universe we know as our galaxy. Instead of paving the whole place and eating food grown in an industrial manner - eventually inside buildings under lights, or beef from cattle standing in packed concrete feed lots or grown in a lab - why don't we rethink the whole economic growth as a means to supporting an irresponsible government, and instead look at whether we want to have the government then support the consolidation of things like agriculture? Seriously, Iowa stands on the brink of the spreading droughts of the SouthWest, and yet relies on the growing of corn, which requires a lot of water and nutrients - to make ethanol for gasoline? We have got to do better than doing unsustainable farming to put gasoline in fuel-burning vehicles. Then, the fuel is spent transporting food across the country - when we could just as easily (even more easily and happily) grow food close by and distribute it without the billions of gallons of fuel for semi-trucks that we have to use under the current setup. We are quite literally idiotic to be doing things like this. And we are starting to see the consequences as the Avian flu has just accelerated over the course of 2024 to require close to 50,000,000 domestic poultry to be culled, and we are getting Avian flu spreading over to beef farms in CA, and the CDC is getting concerned about Avian Flu spreading into the milk supply. Not only that, but while they say that the Avian Flu should not be a cause of concern, there is nothing standing in its way to prevent it from mutating just enough to spread rapidly in humans and cause a lot of harm. If we raise food in unhealthy conditions we are likely to accelerate the spread of disease.

    What I have only just started to realize, and I hope it's not too late, is that most of the food that I think would be healthy - like eggs, fruits and vegetables, may in some or many cases lack the healthy amount of nutrients that should naturally be present in these natural foods when grown in natural conditions. On a micro level, these are where you and I are either receiving or are terribly deficient in the nutrients that maintain things like the health of our brains, for starters, and truly everything else in our bodies.

    At considerable expense in terms of time, I recently began raising chickens in a completely open, outdoor environment where they spend every day outside under the sun and sky, protected by livestock guardian dogs. After many months, and a great deal of time, care and expense, these hens began laying eggs, which we then began to eat every day as we have a great abundance of them: white, brown and light green, from numerous breeds. As I personally began to eat these eggs every day, I began to suspect that I was in some form, as I ate these eggs, recovering from some type of nutritional deficiency that had gone undetected, but that these nearly magical eggs were solving in part. I noticed that our eggs tasted and looked completely different from any eggs I'd ever bought from a grocery store.

    Recently, since I had to find a good source of fresh straw, I met a farmer a few minutes from my house who raises cattle as well as chickens, and also does things like supply hay to the local equestrian community. As it turns out, he has free-range chickens and can sell eggs for $5 per dozen. His pastured cattle make ground beef that he can sell for $6 lb - whereas a lot of people pay nearly that for beef from cattle who stand on a feed lot, are pumped with chemicals and whose meat may not be healthy to eat.

    All that to say, there is a lot going on in the world that is different from what we think it is like. A small farm run by a thrifty and hard-working farmer - right here in Maryland, can compete with far worse practitioners and channels when it comes to fresh eggs and maybe other things. The backstory? Maybe, just maybe, it comes back around to debt, both personal and national. Take a small farmer on say 100 acres who also leases more and also mows hay on numerous other properties. If he is out of debt, and working smart, and if the state and fed doesn't overly tax him or regulate him out of business because of the big farm lobby, he may be able to not only survive, but save, thrive, and have a farm with richer soil and money to hand to his kids or at least one of them with the passion to carry it on.

    On the other hand, if that same 100 acres has a farmer deep in debt, still making payments to buy that land, and feels like his family must always drive new cars, have expensive designer clothes and new iPhones every two years or so - and he has heavy local property taxes, onerous state income taxes, and a weighty federal income tax to contend with - chances are he could lose the land or close up before retirement at least avoiding jeopardizing the future of his children.

    To some extent, we can either remediate the poor economic policies of our governing bodies with good private economic decisions and hard work, or we can augment those poor policies by laziness and needless debt privately.

    One can hope that some opportunity will remain available or even improve - to become more prosperous and healthy as we think about what life and what world we hand to our children. And what example we offer to them.



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    Tom Wright, RPT
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  • 7.  RE: budget cuts

    Registered Piano Technician
    Posted 12-31-2024 09:00
    Thoams

    With all due respect, I hope the monitoring committee takes this post down. My post merely mentioned the president and then how that affects our budget. This post has nothing to with piano work. 

    Wim





  • 8.  RE: budget cuts

    Registered Piano Technician
    Posted 12-31-2024 09:22

    Hi Wim,

    That's fine if they want to take it down, but if they do, I'll ask them to be descriptive of what parts and why.

    Tuning pianos is part of life. My lifetime career as a professional piano technician and piano rebuilder under the shadow literally of Capitol Hill is inseparably a life of hard work and part consternation, part ridicule of a dysfunctional place. I think that there can be some room for expressing one's philosophy as connected to their life's work. They influence each other.

    I could have said in less words: "quite whining about spending cuts for your work when I and my family have been suffering economically for the past four or five years under the very spending whose cutting you now bemoan." And, "maybe there's a link to mental acuity and health - just as much for piano technicians if not more so since we work indoors - to the quality of our food. We as piano technicians need to consider those things.

    Then, as far as the example of the farmer who is financially liberated versus the one who is burdened, I absolutely intend for that too to reflect economic principles that motivate people to offer and perform high quality piano service verses being tempted by their poor decisions to do shoddy work. Work ethic and debt being key factors in running a small business. I'm not implying anything by this except that I've had to learn this myself in "the school of hard knocks."

    Furthermore, whether we are CAUT exclusively or also work independently as business owners, we work in a complex economic environment that now has growing global overtones. We need to do everything we can to understand it and meet the new challenges that will arrive.

    As far as politics go, I am not even interested in politics. I'm interested in either remediating or solving things that politics has already ruined or is working hard to ruin - in your life and in mine. If PTG wishes to censure me for saying something like that, I'll be happy to continue to take that into consideration with how I regard the PTG. The PTG struggles to demonstrate that it is interested in meeting new and changing times and challenges too. I expect censure from the brilliant minds in the PTG!



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    Tom Wright, RPT
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