N.Beach Cops: $5,600 To Wash Hogs

John Seiler:

Our friend and colleague Brian Calle reports in the Orange County Register:

It pays well to wash your motorcycle if you are a cop in Newport Beach, where officers who patrol on motor bikes are paid an additional six hours of overtime every month simply for giving their cycles a wash. The special compensation equates to, on average, about a 5 percent pay hike for motorcycle officers, or about $5,600 a year in additional monies, according to an analysis of city documents and interviews with key city staff.

As alarming as that may seem, this is only one example of special pay that inflates salaries and is often hidden from public view because of the stealth nature of negotiations.

The sweet deal is part of the contract negotiated between the police union and the city – yet another creative example of public employee pay abuses at taxpayer expense….

One might assume that keeping equipment clean should be part of basic job functions, but in the world of public employees, where seemingly everything is negotiable, that is not the case.

Calle calculates that the cops get $52 an hour for washing down their hogs.

How sweet it is — as the late, great Jackie Gleason used to day.

Except for taxpayers, of course, who are soaked for this expensive bike washing.

How hard can it possibly be to keep a bike clean? And if the cops need help, how about hiring some unemployed Californians? “There remain 2.1 million unemployed workers in the state, and more than 1 million have been out of work for 27 weeks or more,” reported the L.A. Times.

Pay the bike washers the minimum wage of $8 an hour, which is 1/6th of what the $52 the overpaid cops get.

Remember this expensive outrage the next time government functionaries, legislators, the union bosses who control them and leftist journalists demand that taxes be increased.