Tag: IT Dept

New Fiscal Year Begins – Finley and Crew Get a Big Raise!

The new budget was finally posted…and the higher-ups at City Hall got an early Christmas present!  Salary and benefits for City Manager Finley deGraffenreid and his assistant jumped almost 9% over last year.  That line item went from $296,000 per year up to $322,000 per year – totaling over $300,000 for the first time ever.  [For comparison, 10 years ago it cost $124,000 to “manage the city”.  So it appears to go up 10% a year without fail]  There were 54 resumes submitted for that Assistant City Manager job when it was created last year….now we know why!

The IT Department jumped a smaller amount…but don’t worry, they aren’t going to go hungry.  IT Director and her one-woman “department”, consisting of Kristy Acevedo, are making a combined $180,881 in salary and benefits this year.  You’d be hard-pressed to make that kind of money in the private sector with zero Cicsco or Microsoft real-world training certificates to your names.  But this ain’t the real world, baby!

Add it all up, and those four people ALONE are costing the taxpayers over $500,000 every year.  Cha-ching!!  That’s the kind of money that buys the brains and wisdom to spend almost $100,000.00 on an A/V system that REALLY only costs $34,000!

The weird thing is that even with two highly-paid  computer “experts”, the IT Department STILL hires outside companies to do consulting work and “IT support”, at even more expense to the city.

That’s right – TSM Consulting is paid $1,800 a month ($21,600 per year) for “IT support and includes on-site visits as well as remote management” for the City of Lampasas [City Council minutes Feb 22, 2016].  Isn’t that odd?  I would think that our two experts could handle basic IT stuff…but apparently not.

Sounds to me like just paying TSM $21,600 a year [line item 505-5395] and getting rid of one of our IT “experts” would save a TON of money.  But what do I know?  I’ve never been paid gobs of money to “manage” or “direct” city government…I just use common sense.

Document Dump – Part III (Monica’s Salary and Benefits)

Every paper-pusher government employee (and their parents) naturally think  they are overworked and underpaid.  They labor under this delusion because a lot of them have LITERALLY never worked in the private sector.  They have no clue what it is like to be under the pressure to perform value-added functions for a profit-driven firm.  They are tax TAKERS and not tax PAYERS.

Now, there are plenty of city employees who bust their ass and are probably underpaid – like the poor bastards who have to wake up at 3am and fix a broken water main or a downed power line.  The people who DO something tangible and have a valuable skill.  Monica Wright is not one of these people.

Monica is in Pay Group 30.  Which, according to the Texas State Auditors Office, means she earns between $101,630 and $171,881 per year.  A range you could drive a truck through, but for sure more than the $100,000 I have been claiming from my very first post (and for which her mommy called me a liar).  We must go to the budget to narrow it down further.

Monica is “Director” of the IT Department.  The IT Department consists of one person – the network administrator….who I suspect is some poor schlub who actually does the hard work of crawling into attics and walls to lay Ethernet cables.  I know that the Network Admin starts in Pay Group 15 (which is a salary of between $33,000 and $52,000).

So, now that we know there are only TWO people in the entire IT Department (a worker and a chick who ‘directs’ him to work) we can look at the budget figures and pin down the salary and benefits further.

In the 2017/2018 budget, the following was printed:

Full time salary: $119,394 (this number has jumped almost 14% in last two years…meaning Monica appears to have gotten a nearly 7% raise in each of the last two years.  WTF??)

Extra pay: $1,418 (I believe this is called “appreciation pay” and is essentially a bonus of one week’s salary paid in December – it is mentioned on page 29 of the employee manual)

Longevity pay: $644 (Monica gets $550 and it will jump to $700 in 2 years)

 

Then come the big fat benefits they never talk about!!

Retirement: $18,255 (according to the Employee Manual, city employees pay 7% into the Texas municipal workers retirement fund, and the city pays in TWICE that amount.  Must be nice.)

Employee insurance: $28,097 (this number has jumped 40% in two years – nobody said why in my records request.)

Three weeks of paid vacation.  Two weeks of sick days (10 days) which can be rolled into the next year if not used.  All twelve holidays off, plus any other granted by city council.  Life insurance payout of one year’s salary in the event of death (paid for by city).  She may or may not have a city car…they won’t tell me.  Oh…and around $800 stipend to pay for a phone.

The amount budgeted for “benefits” has risen 16% in the last two years.

Add all this up and the “salary and benefits” section of the budget, for two people in the IT Department, is close to $180,000.  There is no way Saint Monica makes less than her underling – so I’m guessing that $120,000 in salary is split right about $80,000 to her and $40,000 to the network admin.  Add in all the bennies and you’re talking well over $100,000 in total cost to the taxpayer.

For what?  How competent is Monica (besides the Azbell debacle, I mean)?  Does she come anywhere CLOSE to being worth $105,000 to the city??  Future posts will delve into this matter.