A brief history of our City Manager:
1989 to 1995: Finley was Executive Branch Director at the YMCA in metro Denver, Colorado. This is the earliest job I could find for him. He was about 26 years old when he started.
1996 through 2007: City Administrator in Bridgeport, Nebraska. It’s a very small town of about 1,400 people. It has shrunk considerably since Finley worked there.
2008 through September, 2012: City Manager, Llano, Texas. Another very small town of about 3,500. Finley managed to finagle a salary of about $90,000 in a town where “males had a median income of about $30,000“. This looks like his first taste of how much cheddar a public bureaucrat could make.
Wow. Think about that! Little tiny Llano back in 2008 was paying this guy almost $90,000!!! Plus bennies, of course. Incredible. Mayor Mike Raegor must be a serious moron.
On to the Lampasas years…..
According to the Dispatch, Finley was hired in September of 2012 at an initial salary of $94,500 and a VERY generous car allowance of $500 per month “in exchange for using his personal vehicle for city business.”
That’s $6,000 per year, for those of you who are math-challenged like Misti Talbert.
Very generous indeed. To put that in perspective, the IRS Standard Mileage Rate back then was 55.5 cents per mile. Finley would have to put 900 miles on his car every month doing “City business” for that to make sense.
Driving from one end of Lampasas to the other is MAYBE four miles.
Retirement contributions by the City for Finley were immediately $15,725. That is the “we’ll double-match your contributions” benefit that the City of Lampasas so generously offers. The rest of it (health care, insurance, etc) brought the “total benefits” line up to $31,856 [see page 13]
The entire “City Manager” departmental budget back then (2013/2014) was $143,000 [see page 13]- and that was ALL Finley. No other people were in the department.
Well, within two years, Finley had apparently kissed all the right asses – because for the 2015/2016 budget,his salary skyrocketed 30% to $130,000 [page 16] and the total department cost was now $186,000 – a 24% increase.
These were the profligate Mayor Toups years. Besides throwing massive salary increases at everyone with a pulse, they also wasted a million bucks on the “Business Pork” project running water and electricity over there. Pathetic times, indeed. Some of the usual names sat on council during this time: Talbert, Williamson and Monroe.
A few years later, people like Misti Talbert got a bug up their asses about hiring an ASSISTANT for the City manager. We then had the disastrous Gary Cox experiment – which ended in Gary being fired retiring over a rumored prank involving Goldfish crackers – which may or may not have been inadvertently caused by me.
It becomes harder to tease out exactly what Finley was paid every year from here on out, because the department had TWO people in it (Cox, Rickie Roy, Ryan Ward, etc). The car allowances jumped to $12,000 per year ($6,000 each) and the total salary jumped to $225,000 or so. Department costs exploded to the $387,000 you see today – nearly TRIPLING in ten years.
Only recently did they slash the car allowance 20% to $4,800 each.
Let’s add it all up:
Salary: approximately $130,000 x ten years = $1.3 million. Council was kind enough to secretly bump him up during the pandemic and it now sits at $150,000.
[I’m sure that helps his “average pay” calculation when it comes time to figure out his pension. Just like Sammy Bailey…as I’m pretty sure the later years are weighted more heavily. I’ll have to research that]
Extra pay, incentive pay, overtime pay, longevity pay: [yes, those are all real things – see page 17] = approximately $6,000 x ten years = $60,000
Car allowance: $6,000 x ten years = $60,000
Retirement contributions from City: approximately $17,000 x ten years = $170,000
Insurance (health and other): approximately $16,000 x ten years = $160,000
Throw in a bunch of other shit like free cell phone, travel, etc and my very best guestimate is that Finley will be walking off into the sunset about$1.85 millionbetter off after ten years.
Oh, and there is still the pension to be had…forever.
Not a bad gig for a small town where the average citizen who pays his salary make about $50,000 per year, if they are lucky. A LOT better than if he’d managed a Wal-Mart all this time!