In another month or so, Assistant TO the City Manager Ryan “Dwight Schrute” Ward will get up there with another salary study and inform us that everyone at City Hall is underpaid. Well, except for a few people, but they’ll get raises too.
He’ll also completely ignore the fact that many of those Big Wigs get gold-plated health insurance at about 80% off the market rate. Last year, the cost to insure employees spiked around 13%. He’ll never mention that either.
I took it upon myself to go back to the 2013/2014 approved budget and compare it too our current budget. Then I calculated the compound annual growth rate for a bunch of City departments. For comparison, the City population MAYBE grew about 1% per year during that period.
Here are the results:
City Manager: tops the list at 10.72% ANNUAL growth in expenditures. No surprises there! The guys who turn no wrenches, hook up no power and fix no water pipes while sitting in a nice air-conditioned office take care of themselves the best. NO OTHER DEPARTMENT has annual cost increases like City Manager over the last 10 years.
Building and Planning: comes in next at 10.55% annual growth in expenditures. Seems high for what they do, but what do I know. And no, that doesn’t include all the tens of thousands in “safety grants” that supposedly spur more building around here. Nor does it include the hundreds of thousands handed out to the likes of Deorald Finney and Chris Harrison for their private companies and called “economic development.”
IT Department: comes in third at 9.44% annual growth in expenditures. I’m shocked it isn’t higher. Then again, the amount of actual WORK they do has probably decreased 20% over that same time period as the police department wisely took all the servers out of their hands and handed them over to an expensive third-party to safeguard. Oh, and this is the same IT Department that allowed a ransomware attack that wrecked tens of thousands of dollars of equipment and brought the City to a standstill for 10 days. Nobody was fired or even reprimanded for the huge blunder. Just 10% increases as far as the eye can see!
Hanna Springs Pool: next up at 9.01% annual growth in expenditures. This one is no surprise. The price of chemicals has skyrocketed under Bidenflation and Finley FINALLY realized he had to pay high school kids more than a bag of peanuts to lifeguard. No problem with this department since it is FOR THE CITIZENS!
Fire Department: next up at 6.60% annual compound growth in expenditures. Not sure if the million-dollar fire truck is included in that but that is surprisingly in-line and also it is FOR THE CITIZENS!
Utility Billing and Collections: up next at 6.33% annual growth rate. I have no idea why they need $300,000 a year just to cash checks and collect money, but that’s what it costs. You’d think with the piles of money Ryan Ward requests to “streamline” everything, this item would go DOWN over time – much like the price of a 75-inch TV set. But this is the government we are talking about here.
Police Department: has seen 6.05% annual compound growth rate. Very close to the fire department and ALSO this is a department that DIRECTLY benefits the citizens.
Streets: has seen a measly 3.10% annual compound growth rate. I guess we know where all of Finley and Ryan’s salary/benefits money has been siphoned from! Pathetic. These expenditures don’t even keep place with true inflation. Citizens screwed again here.
Municipal Court: annual growth rate of 2.95%. I don’t even know what they do over there. Guessing this is mostly salaries for clerks? No idea.
Parks: has seen a paltry 1.61% growth rate. Seems impossible with some of their massive expenditures like the pavilion, skate park and the overpriced bathroom at Campbell Park but that’s what the numbers say.
Library: FLAT over 10 years! I’ll be honest. I think the library is mostly filled with bums looking for free wifi so they can fuck around on Facebook and play online poker. I once went on a big “check out all the libraries” binge in my 30s when I lived in other cities. Cities that were spending MILLIONS on their libraries. I found out it was a majority of bums checking out FREE DVD movies and using the Internet. Fuck that. You can pay for that stuff yourself on Amazon. Libraries seem like an expensive anachronism to me. Kind of like the Chamber of Commerce.