Friday, July 23, 2010

With municipal pay like this, who needs Privatopia?

BELL, Calif. – Residents in this modest blue-collar Los Angeles suburb where one in six lives in poverty were angry: Their city manager was getting paid more than President Barack Obama and the police chief more than the commander of the nearly 13,000-member LAPD.

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Their mayor and three of their four council members, people they see every day at the grocery store or church, approved the contracts, and put an obscure measure on the ballot that allowed council members to pay themselves any amount of money.

And they did: collecting between $90,000 and $100,000 a year as part-time officials.

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What a deal for counties and cities: not only do they shift the cost of providing services onto privately governed HOAs, they get volunteers to run them as well who are paid zip for doing so.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The City Manager, of this small town of 30,000 people is being paid $787,000 a year. And poor Obama is only paid $400,000 to screw an entire nation?

Evan McKenzie said...

Quite a racket, don't you think? The cool setup is to get control of some little town or school district and pay yourself a king's ransom--just hope it doesn't get into the press.