A couple pieces worth reading, if you haven’t already:

• Investigative Report on Overtime: With the city facing a budget deficit of $10-12 million, everything is under scrutiny, and that certainly includes the city’s largest expense: salaries. So kudos to the Journal Star — and specifically John Sharp — for the in-depth analysis of overtime expenses in the police and fire departments. All angles of the story were covered between the main article and numerous sidebars.

  I thought it was interesting that the police union would rather see property taxes raised than take a pay freeze, considering almost half the force lives outside of Peoria and would be unaffected by a tax hike. It was also interesting to read that Mayor Ardis is threatening the police department with layoffs if they don’t voluntarily freeze their wages.

• Local Media Beat: Steve Tarter’s weekly column keeps us up to date on what’s happening in local TV and radio. His article this Sunday included some great news: Fort Wayne weatherman Jason Meyers is going away.
  

  A grievance filed by Channel 25 employees over displacement of station personnel by using the aforementioned Fort Wayne weatherman for weekend weather on the station’s local-news show was upheld by an arbitrator last week.

  The news is the last bastion for local programming on commercial television, and here’s WEEK outsourcing the weatherman — roughly one third of the local newscast — after they already obliterated WHOI’s independent news team. It’s sad that local content has sunk to such a low.