Thomas Benigno / Former elected Republican Central Committee member
I was watching, on a television channel, a topic about the business of our State Legislature in California. The topic was about the paid raises of city managers and other government officials.
The issue was that many supervisors and city managers were giving themselves paid raises when right now in California we have a very bad economy in which we are experiencing great loss of jobs. You may have heard of the corruption in the city management in the town of Bell, California, where five local supervisors were giving themselves a raise from $72,000 up to $113,000. And their job description stayed the same. Nothing changed. They had the same duties, no more, no less.
Same thing happened in many cities throughout California where city managers did the same. In many cities with populations of only 35,000, city managers were making close to half a million dollar a year, plus their PERS pension. In some cases it would bring their total income to over a million and a half a year. One reason for those huge payments was that every time a city manager did extra duties, as in going to meetings, or ground breaking ceremonies’, those were considered extra chores and every chore had a bonus in it. The real harm is that the city managers had assistants to do the same jobs, costing the tax payers billions out of local and state funds.
The raping of our government is being helped by those council persons who supported these criminals, called city managers.
As they say, all politics is local
I had predicted during the 90’s that there was too much change in local government, the subtle shift in local policies was slight, no one paid attention to it, mainly because the economy was good.
As we just experienced in Tracy, CA., the ballot measure E to raise taxes, and D to appoint the city clerk.
Measure E was almost a shoe in, but to take the clerks job off the ballot and appoint that person was an example of the same old game that we are experiencing in the matter of the City Managers. Only the voters can stop this take over of government running our lives. Many feel that we need the government to help us run our lives. Those who are elected locally have the advantage of getting elected over & over, because they do special favors for those who help them get elected. We must wake up and find a solution to this control of these politically motivated politicians who eventually run the whole show from city council to State government that only leads to destruction of our way of life.
This doesn’t mean that we can’t have leadership in our government that we could control by having many oversight committees who can help govern the system. Some say that’s more government. Not if it comes from the private sector. Let’s hope in the future we can help stop this waste in government by making common sense decisions.
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