Calendar Confusion

Most people know there are 52 weeks plus one day in a year (two days in leap years). But apparently not the folks at town hall in Egremont.

Each year we vote at town meeting to pay specified salaries for town positions. Say we vote to pay $52,000 for the town jester. If we pay the jester weekly, we shouldn't automatically pay $1,000 a week. Every seventh year or so (actually fewer because of leap years), there will be 53, not 52, paydays, so we'd end up paying $53,000, not $52,000.

How can you deal with this problem? The easiest way is to look at a calendar for the upcoming fiscal year, count the number of paydays, and divide the annual salary by that number. But what if you fail to do that, and find at the end of the year that there's one last payday and you've already paid out the whole annual salary? In Egremont, you just go ahead and overpay people (probably illegally) and then try to deal with the problem in the next year. Do you think our selectmen approve of doing that? You can probably guess.