Several California firefighters managed to triple their base salaries by working tons of overtime last year, according to competing data on city worker pay released Monday by the state controller and the California Policy Center.

The phenomenon of rocketing overtime, according to the reports, hit its apex in Richmond, where one city firefighter had base pay of $113,892 and overtime of $279,105. His total compensation in 2013, including the value of health and pension benefits: $508,893.

This information comes thanks to outgoing Controller John Chiang’s website listing all state compensation, Government Compensation in California. He just was elected the state’s treasurer.

Before that site, it would take journalists days or weeks to dig out such information — if they could find it at all. Now anyone can do it with a few mouse clicks.

More absurdly high pay, all funded by taxpayers:

The pattern was repeated statewide to varying degrees, with one local firefighter doubling his base pay with overtime. Huntington Beach Fire Captain Darren Newton had base pay of $110,866, overtime of $127,866 and total compensation (including other pay and benefits) of $361,382.

While Orange County cities have ranked high on best-paid lists in years past – former Buena Park City Manager Rick Warsinski was No. 1 in 2012, with total comp of $545,394 – they failed to crack the Top 60 this year, according to Transparent California.

Laguna Hills City Manager Bruce Channing was No. 1 in the county, with total pay and benefits worth $383,082. That put him at No. 62 statewide, out of nearly 215,000 workers.

The No. 1 spot belonged to Susan Loftus, then-city manager of San Mateo, with total comp of $567,106.

Like Neo figuring out how life was coded to work in “The Matrix,” everything about California politics is much easier to understand once you realize that by far the top priority of by far the state’s most powerful group is protecting the interests of veteran teachers.

And what is their biggest headache?

The fact that in recent years, budget woes have prevented hundreds of thousands of teachers from getting pay raises except for the “step” raises most get for 15 of their first 20 years and the “column” raises they get for taking meaningless graduate coursework that doesn’t even have to be in the field they teach.

This is why school districts in recent years have been paying for routine maintenance with 30-year borrowing; why parents are being illegally pressured to pay for basic supplies; and why the CTA and the CFT went along with a change in school funding formulas that Gov. Jerry Brown says is about getting more money to struggling students but that unions believe can be manipulated to get more unfettered money to operating budgets to pay for pay raises.

So now comes a concerted push led by Attorney General Kamala Harris to crack down on student truancy and absences, and it’s billed as being about helping students succeed in school.

California is in the midst of a “truancy crisis” that needs to be stopped where it starts: in elementary school, state Attorney General Kamala Harris said Monday as she joined lawmakers to announce a package of bills to help the state better collect truancy data. …

If it’s not stopped at the elementary level, students are more likely to drop out of high school, and dropouts are more likely to end up in prison, Harris said. …

The bills would require the attorney general to issue a report on truancy each year, enhance truancy data collection to monitor attendance, require every county to create School Attendance Review Boards that issue reports on intervention efforts and require prosecutors to issue a report when charges against a parent or student are considered to enforce attendance laws.

Why criminalize student absenteeism? To get money

But if you go down further in the story, the real motive pops up:

Harris’ office released a report that detailed the extent of truancy and absenteeism in California schools and the resulting loss of $1.4 billion a year in funding …

In other words, $1.4 billion a year that could go toward teacher compensation.

Of course student truancy and absenteeism is a serious problem. But if it’s a dire threat to California’s future, why hasn’t it been targeted this way before? Because the teacher compensation status quo wasn’t that bad.

Now, after a few relatively lean years, the CTA and CFT want every last dollar they can get their hands on. If basic funding formulas depend on students getting to school on time, then dammit, school on time.

How do you do that? By raising thea prospect of criminal sanctions against parents if their kids are late or absent.

More evidence for the California Matrix Theory .

Federal officials continue to reshuffle the management of Healthcare.gov, with Kurt DelBene, a former president of the Microsoft Office Division, tapped as the new point person for the troubled Obamacare website.

If DelBene fails to deliver, President Obama should call California State Controller John Chiang.

With no additional state budget funds or expanded statutory authority, Chiang has quietly built one of the nation’s most effective government websites, which has now registered more than 6.9 million page views. The website, publicpay.ca.gov, publishes public employee payroll data for hundreds of thousands of public employees in California and has become an important tool for citizen watchdogs and members of the press.

Chiang’s website, unlike the federal government’s web debacle, is earning universal praise from good government groups, taxpayer advocates and state lawmakers.

Open government advocate: Website informs public about cost to taxpayers

Terry Francke, one of the state’s leading open government advocates, said the website has become an important tool for informing the public about the cost of government.

“You really have to visit this marvelous site and play with the knobs and buttons to appreciate how much information it contains and equally, the kind of analysis it permits about how much employees and executives get in pay and benefits throughout state and local government in California — and the cost to the taxpayer of those figures,” said Francke, general counsel of the open government advocacy group, Californians Aware.

In 2010, following the high-profile corruption case at the City of Bell, Chiang didn’t wait around for local governments to clean up their act. He ordered cities, counties and special districts, under Government Code sections 12463 and 53892, to share salary and other wage information with his office. Initially, some local governments balked, then dragged their feet in disclosing the payroll data. Three years later, the State Controller’s office now boasts a 99% compliance rate.

On Monday, Chiang’s office published its latest payroll update to the employee compensation website, adding payroll data for 637,435 city and county employees who collected more than $38.86 billion in wages in 2012. Just three cities, San Mateo, Compton and Calimesa, failed to file a timely report, and the Controller’s office says those cities are working to comply.

“Making compensation of public employees transparent provides taxpayers with the ability to be more informed and active in local government decisions,” Chiang said in a press release about the recent update.

Redesign

Chiang’s update comes on the heels of a new web redesign that gives the public tools to search, analyze and compare payroll data across government agencies. Perhaps more important than the expanded search functions and custom report-building tools, it has embraced full transparency by publishing all of the raw data files on its website.

At first blush, the December 2013 update, with payroll data for more than a half-million public employees, sounds like a massive undertaking. It’s become routine for the Controller’s office. In October, the Controller’s office added wage and benefit data for 149,342 public employees who received $4.3 billion in wages and $930 million of reported health and retirement benefits in 2012.  In August, it was uploading more data for 341,475 positions with more than $17.5 billion in wages paid in 2012.

To make sense of all the data, Chiang’s office, after consulting with reporters and watchdog groups, developed tools that allow users to quickly identify the top earners at cities, counties and other local governments. In the most recent update, the 10 highest-paid local government officials in California earned a whopping $6.6 million in total compensation. Arturo Gomez, a Kern Medical Center orthopedic surgeon, topped the list with $1.04 million in compensation in 2012.

The custom search tools also make it easy for newspapers to identify trends and high salaries at local government agencies. For example, the three highest-paid county employees in 2012 were all at the same Kern Medical Center, a fact highlighted by the Bakersfield Californian.

That’s the type of information that catches the eye of the state’s leading taxpayer advocate.

“We welcome any information readily available to taxpayers to see how their tax dollars are being spent,” said Jon Coupal, president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. “We suspect many hardworking Californians are going to be shocked at some of the gold-plated compensation packages given in their cities and counties. This may, in fact, make voters less receptive to higher taxes.”

Sen. Norma Torres: Example for other government agencies

Members of the legislature, including a member of the state’s fiscal review and budget committee, praise the website for helping save taxpayers money.

“The public pay database is an example of the kind of transparency government agencies should be striving to achieve,” said state Sen. Norma Torres, D-Pomona, who serves on the Senate Budget and Fiscal Review Committee.  “As an innovative state we should be utilizing the best tools available to make information public.”

It took 55 government contractors and $394 million in taxpayer funds to build President Obama’s online health insurance marketplace. In contrast, the Controller’s office built their website, during the state’s worst budget deficits, without any new funds from the Legislature, another reason its earning rave reviews.

Controller John Chiang

“Government’s investment in technology can be used not just to increase transparency, but help to make it more efficient,” said Assemblyman Ian Calderon, D-Whittier. “Technology is an extremely underutilized tool.”

The payroll data include information on the salary and other compensation of public employee positions in cities, counties and special districts. The data also include compensation information for employee positions in state government that are paid by the controller, including: state employees; the California State University; legislators; and state-wide elected officials.

More data

Open government advocates, such as Francke, want even more data.

“Two conspicuously absent sectors — school districts and courts — will, one hopes, show up before long,” said Francke. “But for now, this is a huge contribution to keeping Californians aware of where much of their taxes go — and for what.”

Jacob Roper, a spokesman for Chiang, said that the controller’s office is currently working with special districts and the University of California system to publish payroll data. However, local school district payroll data is limited by state law.

Top 10 Highest Paid City and County Employees in 2012

The top 10 highest paid city positions in 2012:

The top 10 highest paid county positions in 2012:

By Chris Reed

There are so many killer facts in the Bloomberg News story from Tuesday on how California went to hell that I barely know where to start. So many have never been exposed by the state’s mainstream media. (John Seiler blogged earlier on one of those killer findings from Bloomberg’s investigation.) I urge everyone to read the whole thing. Here is the striking opening:

“Nine years ago, California Democrat Gray Davis became the first U.S. governor in 82 years to be recalled by voters. The state’s 20 million taxpayers still bear the cost of his four years and 10 months on the job.

“Davis escalated salaries and benefits for 164,000 state workers, including a 34 percent raise for prison guards, the first of a series of steps in which he and successors saddled California with a legacy of dysfunction. Today, the state’s highest-paid employees make far more than comparable workers elsewhere in almost all job and wage categories, from public safety to health care, base pay to overtime.”

Pulitzers usually go to much flashier work than exposing government profligacy, but this is Pulitzer-worthy journalism, for sure.

Dec. 7, 2012

By John Seiler

A new study by the Pacific Research Institute shows that compensation for the public sector in California is soaring far above that of the private sector. PRI is CalWatchDog.com’s parent think tank.

For California state and local governments, “a key driver of the budget crises is overly generous government compensation packages,” the study found. “Consequently, California’s budget crises will never be sustainably resolved without addressing the problem of overly generous state and local government compensation.”

“Policy Reforms to Control Rising Government Compensation Costs” is written by Wayne Winegarden, Ph.D., a PRI senior fellow and a lecturer in economics at Marymount University.

Winegarden’s key findings:

1. “California’s government compensation costs are already excessive.” He cited a 2011 study by Jason Richwine and Andrew Biggs, which found:

“In the case of California public employees, wages are slightly lower in the public sector. Initially, benefits appear only slightly higher, implying rough parity in compensation between the public and private sectors. However, properly accounting for retiree health benefits and defined benefit pension plans generates a public compensation premium of around 15 percent. The additional job security granted to public-sector employees is equivalent to an approximately 15 percent increase in public compensation, meaning that the total public-sector pay premium in California may be as high as 30 percent.”

I would add that Richwine and Biggs just came out with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal which found that government workers (teachers were not included) put in about a month less time on the job every year than do private-sector workers. They wrote:

“Based on the most detailed and objective data set available, the private sector really does work more than the public sector. This fact may hold different lessons for different people, but our own take is simple: Before we ask private-sector employees to work more to support government, government itself should work as much as the private sector.”

In sum, government workers get paid 30 percent more than private sector-workers, but work 8 percent (one month) less. Nice part-time work for full-time pay if you can get it.

However, I’m also mindful of the old libertarian maxim, “We’re lucky we don’t get all the government we pay for.” I would be happy if every regulator in the state, even while getting paid their hefty salaries and benefits, stayed home and played video games.

Widening pay gap

Back to the PRI study by Winegarden. He also found, “California’s government compensation premium over California’s private sector is widening.” That means:

“The benefit premium of state and local government workers is not a new phenomenon …. over the past 40-plus years California’s government compensation premium relative to California’s private sector compensation levels has been growing and is currently near historic highs.”

Even as the private sector that pays for everything through record-high taxes shrinks, the government sector that lives off it keeps growing.

Compensation higher than other states

Winegarden also found, “California’s government compensation premium relative to other states cannot be justified based on California’s relatively higher incomes and cost of living.”

Certainly, California’s cost of living is higher than in other states — in part because of the high cost of taxation and the regulations imposed by all those highly compensated functionaries.

But Winegarden wrote:

“State and local government workers in California receive a compensation premium over state and local government workers in Texas and the U.S. that is consistently greater than the compensation premium received by California’s private sector workers compared to private sector workers in Texas and the U.S.”

That makes sense. If you’re in the private sector, you’re competing against not only other Americans, but all 7 billion people on the globe. If costs go up, then worker pay has to go down — or the company moves to another state or country, or goes broke.

By contrast, when government costs go up, taxes are raised — as we just saw with the passage of Proposition 30 and Proposition 39, as well as scores of local taxes and bonds.

There is some check on government because departing businesses and workers then don’t pay taxes in the place from which they were exiled. But that check usually takes a few years to dig in. And governments also commonly meet funding crises by cutting services, such as parks and roads, rather than reducing generous employee pay, perks, pleasures and pensions.

Excessive and growing

Winegarden concluded, “[T]he evidence regarding California’s state and local government compensation costs are clear: when all benefits are included, these costs are excessive and growing.”

The reasons:

“California implements policies that encourage excessive compensation. These policies include mandating collective bargaining, empowering public sector unions, and, in some areas, mandating binding arbitrations. These policies have led to practices such as excessive pension spiking, low retirement ages, covering health care services during retirement, generous pension levels, and permitting the practice of receiving both a government pension and a government salary. When coupled with the declining asset values of California’s pension system, these trends have created a crisis waiting to happen.”

So, that’s how it is as we rush toward 2013. The private sector shrivels under the immense burden of government, even as the government functionaries work less and are paid more — and as taxes are jacked up to record levels to pay for everything.

Until the system falls down and all Jerry Brown’s horses and all the unions’ men couldn’t put it together again.

How would you like to make $200,000 a year? Join the California government. State budget and deficit problems? Let somebody else worry about it.

Controller John Chiang just released the salary list for the state’s top moneybags. Names are not known for most of these positions, but ought to be. The worst:

* $836,706 for the state prison system’s top psychiatrist. It’s enough to drive the rest of us crazy.

* $777,423 for a prison doctor, according the L.A. Times’ list.

* $612,000 for the chief investment officer of the state pension system.

* $599,403 for a prison dentist.

* $585,360 for the chief of the workers’ comp insurance fund.

* $482,234 for the president of the stem-cell agency funded by Proposition 71, which gullible voters passed in 2004. It was supposed to find cures for all sorts of illnesses. It only has cured the pain in its functionaries’ pocketbooks.

Remember these massive payouts the next time Gov. Jerry “Jobs Killer” Brown and Democrats in the Legislature cry poor mouth and demand that taxes be increased.

These fat cat functionaries will be getting pensions above $200,000 as well.

The government is living high off the hog. The people of California are taxed to death and forced to live like pigs in pens.

July 6, 2011