Tag: overpaid employees

City Manager Suggests 4% to 5% Pay Increases For Some Employees. Overpaid Police Chief Agrees. Uses Age-Old Bullshit To Justify.

In a totally unexpected move, City manager (current salary and benefits of roughly $210,000 or over $4,000 per week) suggested 4% to 5% pay raises during this budget cycle. This on TOP of raises and COLAs last year.

I find this odd, because according to local democrats, the CPI is only 3% now.

As you can see, police Chief Jodi Cummings agreed heartily. He uses the age-old bullshit of “keeping up with the other cities” as his ammunition. Because, we are like, right on the edge of Austin…or something.

Ryan Ward likes to use towns like Fredericksburg and Marble Falls to compare salaries, so that they all look underpaid. However, when he did that last year, it showed our police chief is actually OVERPAID by 7.9%!!

That’s right: according to our OWN assistant-to-the-City-manager Ryan Ward and his “salary study” from last year, Cummings is ALREADY overpaid by 7.9%!

Whoops! So you think they’ll lower it 8% this year? I’m guessing not.

They always trot out the old “these people will leave for Austin if we don’t pay them!” nonsense every year. You know what I say? Fuck it – let them go to Austin. They get paid more there because it is a liberal shit hole with a much higher cost of living and has the worst traffic in the state. Go right ahead and leave for Austin, if you are that stupid.

You want to know how else I know the police chief is overpaid (besides the fact that Ryan Ward told us so last year)? Because Brian Lee, the police chief of Burnet (right down the road) makes a lot less than Jodi Cummings! Imagine that!

Lee pulls down $73,544 and Cummings makes 36% MORE at $100,000. Something tells me you could inform old Jodi he’s only going to make $90,000 next year and he would not go anywhere. And if he did? I could think of a few coppers who would be more than happy to step into that position for $90,000 (plus another $36,000 in benefits!)

In fact, when Burnet searched for a new chief two years ago, they had EIGHTY APPLICANTS for the job! When you have 80 applicants for a job, that is the free market telling you that you are offering a mighty fine salary and might want to lower it a bit.

I’ll repeat: Burnet pays their chief $73,500 and they got EIGHTY APPLICANTS for the job.

But according to some, if we do not pay six figures to every Tom, Dick and dickless, they will immediately run to the big city with more traffic, higher costs and more pains in the ass.

OK. If you believe that one, I have a bridge to sell you.

If I’m not mistaken, when Lampasas was searching for an assistant City manager, they had over FIFTY applicants! Of course, that didn’t stop Finley from overpaying for the “talent” by about $25,000. Ward was offered $110,000 (bumped to $116,000 very quickly) when the national average for ACM is more like $85,000.

I do all this research as a public service for City council: do NOT fall for the bullshit that anybody will leave if they don’t get 5% more money this year. Council has ALREADY been EXTREMELY generous in years past when there was no inflation at all:

City Big Wigs Want Raises For Everyone Because of Inflation. Conveniently Forget All The Big Raises When Inflation Was Negligible

Time to reign in the reckless spending and show some of these highly-paid bureaucrats that they can’t put a gun to your heads with this “we’ll move to Austin” bullshit.

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.