Tag: overpaid

More Overpaid Parasites

Yet more documentation that MANY state and local government employees continue to help themselves at the expense of the people with productive jobs.

Link to article below, but here is an excerpt:

Last year, we found 1.7 million public employees earned $100,000 or more. The vast majority – 1.3 million six-figure earners – worked at the state and local levels. There were 105,000 local and state government employees out-earning every governor of the 50 states at a salary of $190,000 or more.

In Texas, 356 municipal employees made more than all governors ($190,000). Some of these towns are small, like Stanton (pop. 2,900), where the manager earned $314,696. In Whitesboro (pop. 4,000) and Manvel (pop. 10,000), the administrators were paid $312,000 and $292,529, respectively.

In Florida, the city attorney of the seaside community Dania Beach, Florida (pop. 32,000) gleaned $436,917 – that’s more than any U.S. president. At the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, eight police officers and detectives made between $300,000 and $783,000 last year.

Nearly 10,000 employees of the University of California system pulled down more than $200,000. This includes 65 highly compensated public employees who made between $1 million and $3.6 million.

Link to original article HERE.

Oh, and speaking of overpaid, arrogant government employees, I have to wonder which city employee had the cops called on their “princess” for drinking at a party at their house! Then supposedly called the cops wanting to know who tattled on their “princess”. Hmmmm….I wonder who that could have been….an arrogant city employee with a teenage daughter….hmmmmm.

Now, I know kids will be kids. I was one myself. But if my parents caught me, they beat my ass. If I had been lucky enough to have a Mom who worked for the city and she got special treatment, well she would have STILL beat my ass and been thankful she had friends in high places. Only a truly arrogant person would actually demand to know who dropped the dime. Truly unbelievable arrogance and entitlement. Not surprising at all, if this is who I hear it is.

Side-By-Side IT Comparison: How Overpaid Are Monica and Kristy?

I hate to flagellate a deceased equine, but literally every single city or county I look at makes it more and more obvious that our IT Department is FAR larger and more expensive than it has any right to be. Just for kicks, I recently compared the entire COUNTY of Burnet to our little town of Lampasas. Here is what I found:

LAMPASAS

Population 7,800

Area 6.2 square miles

IT staff – 2

IT salary $125,881

IT benefits $55,081

Consulting expense $21,600

TOTAL $202,562

BURNET COUNTY

Population 50,000

Area 1021 square miles

IT staff – 2

IT salary $113,336

IT benefits $43,788

Consulting expense $0

TOTAL $157,124

As you can see, Lampasas spends 29% MORE on salary, benefits and paying for outside consultants.

I have included “consulting” in this comparison because it represents the money we hand to TSM Consulting ($1,800 per month, every month) to be on call to do Kristy’s job for her. That is just the MINIMUM. They actually pay them more when there is actual work to do….but I am being conservative in my comparison.

You may notice the benefits are wildly higher here in Lampasas – something I have railed against for a year now. Here is the breakdown on benefits:

Kristy and Monica: $19,288 for retirement and $25,905 for insurance

Burnet county: $12,520 for retirement and $21,528 for insurance

The annual retirement contribution is FIFTY-FOUR PERCENT HIGHER here in our little town than it is 15 miles down the street. Insurance is TWENTY PERCENT HIGHER.

Yet more proof that our IT Department is over-staffed, over-paid and under worked. I say “under worked” because Monica takes off over TWO MONTHS every year, when you add it all up (as I did).

But that STILL isn’t enough loafing around for our IT Princesses! Oh, no! They want MORE time off, as you can see below:

How Many Hours They Actually Put In

Since I started this whole journey with the Azbell Electronics no-bid $94,000 “Ferrari of A/V systems” contract in the IT Department, I thought it fitting to start there when it comes to ACTUAL hours worked.

After requesting a “payroll history report” for a certain IT Department head, I came up with the following. Remember, there are 26 pay periods of 80 hours each (40 hours per week for two weeks). Fifty-two weeks times 40 hours yields 2080 hours as the maximum. Of course, very few people work a 40 hour week for all 52 weeks of the year (except tons of small-business owners, but whatever).

We’ll assume two weeks vacation and some sick days thrown in there. So the normal private-sector worker probably works about 1950 hours per year, maybe. Here are the number of hours worked per year for the IT Department head:

2013 1827.5 hours (equivalent to over 6 weeks vacation)

2014 1798.5 hours (equivalent to over 7 weeks vacation)

2015 1730.5 hours (equivalent to 8.7 weeks vacation – well over 2 months)

2016 1711.5 hours (equivalent to 9.2 weeks vacation – 2 months plus a week)

2017 1736.5 hours (equivalent to 8.5 weeks vacation – two months)

2018 1725 hours (equivalent to 8.8 weeks vacation – well over two months)

So over just those 6 years, we see about 48 weeks off of work – or nearly a year! Work 5 full years – take almost a year off….fully paid, of course.

Or put differently, if an employee costs the taxpayer $110,000 per year but only puts in 1725 hours of “work”, it is costing the taxpayer almost $64 per hour of “work”.

This also doesn’t take into account the $1800 per month the City pays TSM Consulting to be on call for all the network issues that TWO City IT employees aren’t capable of doing. Nor does it count the thousands of dollars to Cardinal Tracking Inc. or random guys named Neil Cardwell. Nor does it count all the other chunks of money like the “appreciation pay” she gets at Christmas or the “longevity pay” she gets for X number of years polishing a seat with her rear end.

So not only is the pay FAR higher than the private sector…the hours are far less too! Gotta love it. The question remains: will Misti “Drunken Sailor” Talbert have the guts to freeze or even cut salaries this year? Or will they do what they always do…spend, spend, spend?

Lampasas Government Personnel Costs – Nearing $80,000 Per Employee

City budgeting is slowly getting underway for the 2019-2020 fiscal year. So I thought it a good time to reflect on government worker pay. One good question I had: what are the TOTAL personnel costs for all city government workers?

That number was easy to find in 2015: according to the July 25th minutes of that year, there was a 4% increase to a grand total of $7,207,856

Since employee count seems to bounce between 100 and 110, I will be conservative and assume 110 employees – or $65,525.96 per employee.

What was the number for 2018? Tough to say, as I was unable to find the exact quote from Finley for that year. I am going to request that number from City Hall today. However, we can make an educated guess.

In July of 2018, as Misti “Drunken Sailor” Talbert was advocating salary increases for city workers, it was stated that each 1% increase impacted the taxpayer by $61,000 – which tells us that salary expenses were around $6,100,000 last budget.

We also know from Finley’s own admission (Aug 8, 2016) that “City worker benefits comprise 40.8% of salary expense” – 24.3% is retirement, FICA and workers comp while 16.5% is health insurance.

SO – we take $6,100,000 and multiply by 1.408 and we get $8,588,800 for total personnel costs (or a 19% increase in 3 years – a 6.4% increase per year)

If we are charitable and divide this by 110 employees, we come up with $78,080 per employee per year.

If we go with 100 city employees, we get $85,888 per year. I have no idea what the exact current headcount is for Lampasas City government but it is somewhere in that range.

That $78,000 per year is ridiculous enough…but wait til you see how many (or how few) hours some employees actually work each year! Coming soon….

Something to Remember as Our City Budget is Currently Being Discussed

Finley and his merry gang will be huddled over tables for the next month or two, deciding on who gets what from the public trough. I have long said that the higher-ups at City Hall are paid far out of proportion to reality, common sense and the private sector.

(For instance, we have TWO people in the IT “Department” who cost the taxpayer $197,000 per year – and neither one possess the credentials that would be expected (nay, demanded) in the real world. As a result, they end up paying tens of thousands of dollars MORE annually to outside consultants (such as TSM Consulting, Cardnial Tracking, and some dude named Neil Cardwell) to do their job for them).

Well, seems the Census Bureau just proved me right – the following is an article taken from the news:

Which class of full-time, year-round American workers has the highest median earnings? Is it the class that works for private-sector employers? Is it the class that works for the government? Or is it the entrepreneurial class, who are self-employed?

According to the Census Bureau’s Personal Income Table 07 (PINC-07), the competition isn’t close. When it comes to making money in the modern United States of America, government workers win.

Among Americans who actually earn income by working, they are the upper class.

In 2017, according to PINC-07, there were 115,704,000 Americans who worked full-time (at least 35 hours per week) and year-round (at least 50 weeks in the year). The table divides these workers into three general classes: “private wage and salary workers,” “government wage and salary workers” and “self-employed workers.”

Of the full-time year-round workers, 88,296,000 were private-sector employees; 17,617,000 were government employees; and 9,750,000 were self-employed. (Another 42,000 were classified as “unpaid family workers.”)

The overall median earnings for all of these full-time year-round workers in 2017 were $48,500.

Workers in private industry, however, made less than the overall median. Their median earnings were $46,797.

The self-employed did a little better than the national rate. Their median earnings were $50,383.

But government workers did the best. Their median earnings were $53,435.

That was 14.2 percent better than private-sector workers and 6.1 percent better than the self-employed.

The Census Bureau also divided government workers into two categories. Federal government workers comprised one category, numbering 4,178,000 individuals. State and local government workers comprised the other, numbering 13,439,000.

The median earnings of state and local government workers ($51,202) were higher than the median earnings in any of the four categories of private-industry and self-employed workers.