Thanks to a state law that celebrates the time-honored practice of double dipping, the City of Boston is unable to benefit financially from certain municipal employees doing their jobs — performing weddings — during working hours (“Boston tightens rules on nuptials,” Metro, June 18). Limiting the hours that weddings take place and imposing an additional $15 administrative fee hardly controls what your reporter describes as “the lucrative marriage business at City Hall”; rather, it imposes increased logistical and financial pressure on taxpayers.
Until trash collectors start supplementing their salaries with trash fees, for example, the state should reconsider when and how it allows on-the-job employees to pocket fees for services rendered. In this perpetually depressed economy, the state government’s walking away from this revenue stream is unconscionable.