Boy, City council and Finley REALLY know how to pinch the pennies! Remember all this when you pay your electric bills every month – the bills that just went up on November 1st of last year because City Government has to feed that rapacious monkey known as Fat Nerf Job Salaries.
The City recently hired Ryan Ward as the new Assistant City Manager (ACM). I requested salary details since Finley didn’t want to provide them last week to The Dispatch. Turns out Mr. Ward will be paid $110,000 per year. If that seems high for an ASSISTANT City manager in a small town in Central Texas, you are correct. It is 30% higher than the national average.
According to The Dispatch last week:
The midpoint of that range is $84,540 – which is a hell of a good STARTING salary for a small town in a state that has a much lower cost of living than, say, California or New York (or Austin, for that matter). I guess Finley (who has never worked in the private sector) doesn’t see it that way. Instead, they will START Mr. Ward at $110,000 per year.
[Don’t forget the bennies, either! According to Finley himself on many occasions, the cost of those generous government benefits (medical, retirement, etc) is roughly 40% of an employees salary. That means Mr Ward is now a permanent $154,000 line item in the budget every single year.]
I’d be surprised if Mr Ward didn’t also have a generous car/phone/travel allowance as well.
Here’s the weird thing: Ward left his previous job in Santa Fe County after less than two years AND he was making $104,000 there. Why pull up stakes and uproot your family for a measly $6,000 pay raise? I’d make a small wager that Finley promised him a quick raise after 6 months or so. Even money says we see Mr Ward get a bump in salary before the year is out. Any takers??
According to his LinkdIn profile, he has jumped around a lot (5 jobs in the last 10 years) with a short stint in the private sector:
He spent 12 years with the Texas DOT (2000 to 2012) then jumped ship to work for the City of San Angelo (December 2012 to July 2017).
He then jumped to the private sector for a very short time (18 months) when he worked for NTT DATA Services in Austin. Then he jumped BACK to the public sector with the City of Austin as “Division Manager, Right of Way” – for just barely over a year – where he was making $122,000 per year (according to govsalaries.com).
Then he skedaddled off to New Mexico just as the pandemic hit in March 2020 where he didn’t last two years – and is now returning to Texas.
I’m also wondering why Finley had to look in New Mexico for an ACM? There are 20,000 people in Lampasas County and by his own admission he had 30 applicants for the job.
Then again, Finley has had very shitty luck with his ACM picks thus far. Pick #1 (Gary Cox ) was a buffoon who wasted a ton of money (recycling program, overpriced A/V system for City council that he signed off on) and then got fired resigned after a rumored prank about Goldfish crackers. Not exactly a stellar career here in Lampasas
Then Rickie Roy was made ACM, but I’m not sure Finley had anything to do with that. Roy was already a proven winner (public works) who moved up through the ranks and then inexplicably resigned.
Then Finley was tasked with finding a replacement – who was apparently hired but then quickly quit and decided to take another job somewhere else! Strike two!
So this will be Finley’s third swing with the ACM bat. Can’t wait to see how it turns out!