The new budget was finally posted…and the higher-ups at City Hall got an early Christmas present! Salary and benefits for City Manager Finley deGraffenreid and his assistant jumped almost 9% over last year. That line item went from $296,000 per year up to $322,000 per year – totaling over $300,000 for the first time ever. [For comparison, 10 years ago it cost $124,000 to “manage the city”. So it appears to go up 10% a year without fail] There were 54 resumes submitted for that Assistant City Manager job when it was created last year….now we know why!
The IT Department jumped a smaller amount…but don’t worry, they aren’t going to go hungry. IT Director and her one-woman “department”, consisting of Kristy Acevedo, are making a combined $180,881 in salary and benefits this year. You’d be hard-pressed to make that kind of money in the private sector with zero Cicsco or Microsoft real-world training certificates to your names. But this ain’t the real world, baby!
Add it all up, and those four people ALONE are costing the taxpayers over $500,000 every year. Cha-ching!! That’s the kind of money that buys the brains and wisdom to spend almost $100,000.00 on an A/V system that REALLY only costs $34,000!
The weird thing is that even with two highly-paid computer “experts”, the IT Department STILL hires outside companies to do consulting work and “IT support”, at even more expense to the city.
That’s right – TSM Consulting is paid $1,800 a month ($21,600 per year) for “IT support and includes on-site visits as well as remote management” for the City of Lampasas [City Council minutes Feb 22, 2016]. Isn’t that odd? I would think that our two experts could handle basic IT stuff…but apparently not.
Sounds to me like just paying TSM $21,600 a year [line item 505-5395] and getting rid of one of our IT “experts” would save a TON of money. But what do I know? I’ve never been paid gobs of money to “manage” or “direct” city government…I just use common sense.