It’s amazing to me how often we read or hear stories about the greed and incompetence of politicians – at every level of government. But, occasionally a story surfaces that seems to top everything, until of course the next big shocker comes along. The latest outrage recently took place in Bell, California. It is a story of such egregious civic mismanagement that it should be shouted from the rooftops.

Here are the facts:
-The City Manager (Chief Administrative Officer), Robert Rizzo, is paid a salary of $787,637, with an automatic 12 percent annual increase.
-The Police Chief, Randy Adams, earns $457,000 a year, which is double the amount that L.A. Police Chief is paid.
-Assistant City Manager, Angela Spaccia, is paid $376,268 a year, which is more than most city managers are paid.
-The city of Bell has a population of about 38,000 residents, mostly Hispanic.
-The per capital personal income of the city residents was $24,800 in 2008, compared with a nationwide average of $32,819.
-City Council members are paid upwards of $100,000 a year for part-time positions, compared with other cities about the size of Bell, which pay about $400 a month for comparable responsibilities. The city council has increased its compensation for serving on a variety of city agencies to $7,873 per month.
-Since 2004, Bell has sold two general obligation bond issues totaling $50 million, which has increased the city’s per capital debt from $599 to $1,972 in that time.

To provide some perspective on how much the compensation of city managers has grown over the years, in 1989, the City of Vernon, a small industrial city on the edge of Los Angeles, paid it’s manager an annual salary of $162,804, which made him the highest paid city official in California at the time. By comparison, the mayor of L.A. received $97,654 a year and the governor of the state was paid an annual salary of $85,000.

The L.A. County District Attorney’s office, which is conducting an investigation to determine if the city of Bell has violated any compensation laws, noted that council members in a city the size of Bell would normally be paid about $400 a month. According to the DA’s office, state law governs how much city council members can be paid, but not the amounts that a city council decides to pay a city’s administrators.

It appears that the City of Bell and its council members have not violated any laws by compensating themselves and the city administrator so generously. That may be, but an overflow crowd at a recent city council meeting protested loudly and called for the resignation of the Mayor, Oscar Hernandez. However, the city attorney said council members could not discuss salaries in public without giving advance notice.

In response, Bell residents have formed a group called the Bell Association to Stop the Abuse, which is calling for an independent audit of city salaries and contracts.

Looking at the situation from another perspective, the mayor defended the salaries being paid, saying that Bell was near bankruptcy when they hired the city administrator (Rizzo). Since then, they said, he put the city “on sound financial footing, with its general fund nearly tripling to about $15 million.”

Rizzo commented, “If that’s a number (his salary) people choke on, maybe I’m in the wrong business. I could go into private business and make that money. This council has compensated me for the job I’ve done.”

He may be right about the council compensating him for the job he has done, but I seriously doubt that he could make the same amount of money in “private business.” That statement alone shows how little he really knows about “private business.”

As for the Assistant City Manager, who is paid more than $376,000 a year, in my opinion, there is absolutely no justification for such over-compensation.

The police chief stated that he was enticed out of retirement as the former chief of police in Glendale, California, a much larger city than Bell, noting that when he was approached about the position in Bell, he informed them that they would have to pay him what he was receiving in retirement plus the $165,000 compensation as police chief. He further stated that he was brought in to put an end to corruption in Bell’s police department, and that some of the former members of Bell’s police force are in federal prison.

The mayor also observed that the city’s streets are cleaner, that there are “lovely parks, and our community is better,” adding, “These things just don’t happen, they happen because (I) had a vision and made it happen.”

When he steps down, City Manager Robert Rizzo will get at least $600,000 a year in pension checks, making him the highest-paid retiree in the state. The police chief will get more than $411,000.

The situation with the City of Bell is just another example of politicians who run roughshod over their constituents, apparently in the belief that, once they are elected, they are free to do whatever they please with taxpayers’ money. There is unbridled spending today at every level of government, including federal, apparently in the belief that once they are in office they are no longer accountable to their constituents.

They are wrong, and the residents of the city of Bell are about to prove it by showing them the door. I say, good riddance.

There ought to be a law against the sort of fiscal ignorance and irresponsibility we are witnessing just about everywhere we look in government today.

© 2010 Harris R. Sherline, All Rights Reserved

Read more of Harris Sherline’s commentaries on his blog at www.opinionfest.com