Eleven million bucks! For 115 employees. By my math, that is an AVERAGE of $96,133 in salary and benefits for EVERY SINGLE employee of the City of Lampasas.
How do I arrive at this? According to Ward himself, a 3% COLA will add $230,000 of expense to City payrolls.
230,000 / .03 = $7.66 million in current salaries.
Finley has said repeatedly over the years that benefits are about 40% of salaries.
$7.66 million x 1.4 = $10.724 million in CURRENT salary and benefit costs.
But wait! Add on the lowest COLA of $230,000 and you reach $10,954,000.00
Not quite $11 million. Oh but wait! Health insurance costs are jumping 12% this year! That easily puts us over the $11 million mark. First time ever!
Another year or so and we’ll be looking at an AVERAGE salary of six figures for every single employee of the City. Pretty amazing! I know skilled nurses who don’t make that much – and they have about 20x more responsibility than Finley deGraffenreid does.
Don’t forget, as part of their benefits package, guys like Finley get DOUBLE retirement matching by the City. If he puts in $7,000 per year, the City throws in $14,000 for him.
You won’t hear the word “benefits” uttered ONCE by Ryan Ward during the salary begging coming up next week. Not once.
