Tag: City manager

Finley deGraffenried: – $1.86 Million Over Ten Years With Lampasas.

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.”

Yearbook photo: Most Likely To Be City Manager...or play the tuba.

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!

City Manager Gets A Secret $10,000 Raise. Seriously.

Last week, the local radio station asked [City manager] Finley deGraffenreid if he had gotten a $10,000 raise from City council recently and he had no comment. I don’t know how in the hell the radio guy found out about it, but Finley did not deny it.

Wha-what?? Finley got a $10,000 raise? First I’ve heard of this. I saw nothing about it in the minutes nor have I heard it discussed in any City council meeting. Which means it was done in “executive session” – which is Latin for “in secret”. Not wanting to post a falsehood, I did the simplest thing I could think of to answer the question: I asked Finley point blank if he was recently given a $10,000 raise. His answer? Yes, it is true.

Like cats burying their stinky turds in shame, so do The Seven Goldfish hand out 7.7% raises to a guy ALREADY making $130,000 per year in secret executive session.

Mind you, that $140,000 is just the SALARY part. According to Finley himself in past comments, you need to add 40% to that to get the TRUE cost to the taxpayer – to account for the cushy benefits and retirement packages. That would put him at roughly $182,000 annual cost to the taxpayer. OUCH!!

I find it sickening that at a time when many of us taxpaying saps are being laid off and/or taking pay cuts due to FORCED government closings/overreactions from the Wuhan virus, the very people who forced businesses shut are getting large raises.

[Oh – and they STILL are crying poor about paying lifeguards a decent wage. Guess we won’t have any pools open this year]

Just to recap for those on the short bus (and the IT Department):

  1. City forces businesses closed in a massive overreaction to Wuhan Flu
  2. City cries poor – can’t pay more than minimum wage to pool workers and thus complains they have nobody applying for pool jobs.
  3. City goes behind closed doors and hands Finley a $10,000 raise ON TOP of his current $130,000 salary.

This is what happens when FOUR of the current seven members of City council (Toups, Kuehne, Clark, Williamson) owe their current or past paychecks to forced extractions from the taxpayers. It means they don’t understand the value of a dollar and will always side with the OTHER tax TAKERS instead of the tax PAYERS they supposedly represent. Over HALF of City council was or is, technically, employed by the government and reliant on taxpayer largess.

Of course, we have no idea how this all went down or who voted for or against – since it was all done in secret. As usual. MY guess is it was unanimous – that way they can present a unified front and deflect any second-guessing by us fools in the private sector. Call it honor among the council thieves.

To say the optics of this are really bad would be an understatement -which is why they kept it hush-hush. What the HELL would possess City council to SECRETLY hand Finley a $10,000 raise NOW when he ALREADY costs the taxpayers roughly $15,000 PER MONTH??? The timing is extremely bizarre.

I can think of only a few scenarios:

  1. Finley marched in and demanded it or he would quit on the spot.
  2. Finley is considering retiring in the next year or two and wants to jack up his “average salary” so his pension is higher for the rest of his life (this is common among government parasites).
  3. The Seven Goldfish are about 50% dumber than I previously estimated.

So – which is it, guys?? Care to comment in the public record at tonight’s meeting? Maybe call up The Dispatch and explain yourselves? Or are you just going to assume the taxpayer will bend over and take it like they always do?

FUN FACTS from the CURRENT BUDGET [pages 2 and 16]

ANNUAL City manager line item expenses: $331,480 **

INCLUDES:

FULL TIME SALARY: $225,000

EXTRA PAY: $4,332

CAR ALLOWANCE: $12,000

RETIREMENT BENEFIT: $37,929

HEALTH INSURANCE BENEFIT: $23,473

TELEPHONE: $2,500

** Now remember, these budget numbers included the position of Assistant City Manager (RIP Gary Cox) who was fired ‘resigned’ in October. The ACM position was a make-work job that Misti Talbert was all for creating a couple years ago. Why did they need to create an ACM position? Because Finley was apparently super busy with expensive and useless side projects like the $1.5 million dollar City Hall remodel and the $2 million weed patch ‘business park’ project.

[So, they created an entirely new Asst. City Manager $90,000 salary position (plus tens of thousands in benefits) for an “assistant”. He is now gone.]

However, as I recall, Ricky Roy has been moved up to ACM recently and I’m assuming that “City Manager” line item will continue to grow, since the position wasn’t eliminated.

Perhaps The Seven Goldfish are handing Finley $10,000 because they haven’t had to pay Gary Cox for the last 6 months? OK – but then why do it in secret? Why not make it a one-time bonus instead of a permanent raise?? IF they survived the last 6 months without an ACM, then why not continue to do so??

All good questions I doubt we’ll ever get an answer to.