Pretty soon, City Manager Finley deGraffenreid will kick off the budget process. He will tell us how everyone is underpaid and needs fat raises, even though this has been demonstrably false for many years now. The AVERAGE salary and benefits package for a City of Lampasas employee is now over $90,000 per year.
I have written about it pretty much every year.
Finley Preparing To Tell Us How Underpaid Government Employees Are – Don’t Believe It
And every year, City council gives Finley everything he wants. Finley has lucked out with millions in “Covid relief” being dumped in his lap as well as surging sales tax receipts due to raging inflation. Those facts have papered over reckless spending. But those gifts are over now. Time to sober up.
Here is a fun game anyone at home can play:
First – find a city that is close in size to Lampasas. The list of them is HERE.
Then, Google the name of that City + 2022-2023 budget. For instance, “Kirby Texas City budget 2022-2023″
Then read through the budget and be flabbergasted by how much money Lampasas spends to run the government compared to pretty much every other city our size.
One thing you will notice with about 90% of those other cities is that they do not have an IT Department. Or if they do (like Cureo, Texas) they spend a fraction of what we do. For instance, Cureo spends $114,000 per year. We spend $407,000 per year.
I have written about this IT money wasting before:
Side-By-Side IT Comparison: How Overpaid Are Monica and Kristy?
Some of these cities only have 55 or 59 full-time employees (Kirby and Hitchcock) – we have around 115.
Kirby, Kaufman and Cuero all spend about $1.6 million to $1.8 million on their police. Aubrey TX spends $2.03 million Floresville spends $2.5 million. We spend $3.62 million.
The fire departments? Kirby is at $1.33 million and Cuero is around $750,000. We spend $2.6 million.
Medical insurance? Most towns I looked at spent around $6,000 to $7,000 per city employee. We spend more like $12,000.
Many of these cities don’t even have an “Assistant City Manager” – we do. Not only that, we started our ACM at $113,000 last January (about $25,000 OVER the average starting salary) and gave him a quick 6% raise. DESPITE the fact they had FIFTY-FOUR people apply for that job.
Retirement benefits? Lampasas matches employees at a 2-1 ratio – something even our late City councilman Randy Clark said was “very generous.” Other cities? Not nearly as generous.
People out in the real world are PLENTY pissed off at their taxes this year. They see government workers who are paid more than them, get WAY more vacation time than them, can never get fired (even if they allow hackers into the City’s computer system to destroy it), and who get overly generous retirement matching that THEY don’t get but they are sure paying for.
This could be the year that City council steps up and restores fiscal sanity. The question is: will they?