When I see our city government write a check for around $116,000 every single month to Scott and White (page 39 of City Council packet) for their gold-plated health care plan, I get to wondering if other cities are reaming their taxpayers just as hard. So I went looking.
Harker Heights is just about 35 miles down the road, so I figured that was a good place to start. They are 400% bigger than Lampasas, but located in the same general area. I was mainly curious about the city manager and information systems expenses, since that is where we seem to spend an exorbitant sum. They don’t break out those departments in quite the same way Lampasas does, but I was still able to find some startling facts.
Harker Heights lumps a bunch of people into the “Administration” department. According to their latest budget, that department includes 21 full-time employees (see pages 77 and 78 of the 2017/2018 approved budget) – including such titles as City Manager, Assistant City Manager, Human Resource Director, Technology Director, Assistant City Secretary, Human Resource Clerk, Records Management Coordinator, etc, etc.
For those 20 or 21 people (depending of whether you use the 2017 actual or the 2018 estimated number of employees), the City of Harker Heights spent the following (page 80 of approved budget):
- Salaries: $818,900
- Overtime $8,000
- Worker’s comp $6,500
- Health Insurance $76,900
- Social security $63,300
- Retirement $124,400
Somehow they managed to spend only slightly over $1,000,000 for salaries and benefits for those TWENTY important people! Amazing. Health insurance was only $77,000 for those employees for the entire year – or less than $4,000 per employee.
Lampasas now spends almost $1,400,000 per year on health insurance ($116,000 per month multiplied by 12) for roughly 110 employees – or over $12,000 per employee. Truly amazing.
The retirement number, even if you include the Social Security line item, works out to just over $9,300 per employee….as compared to over $14,000 for our “important people” (see below).
Let’s look at just FOUR of our “important people” as we have in the past.
All figures are taken from the most recent approved budget:
City Manager and Information Systems combined (4 employees):
- Salary $349,000 ($87,000 each)
- Insurance $49,689 ($12,422 each)
- Retirement $56,389 ($14,097 each)
Health insurance for just those four people is costing the city almost $50,000 per year…yet Harker Heights manages to provide insurance for their entire 20-person “Administration Department” (which includes many of the same titles) for only 50% more. Incredible.
I noticed that elections for Lampasas city council, mayor, etc are fast approaching and that many of the current members have re-filed and plan to run again. Here is a thought for those running: maybe this time around, you can all ask a few more questions about the huge sums of money being spent in our town and maybe take ten or twenty minutes to do a little research to see if all the stuff Finley throws on your plate is legit….rather than unanimously approving everything on the table? You know….stuff like $100,000 for an A/V system that originally bid out at $34,000. Or why we spend $1.4 million a year on health insurance.
Just a thought.