How would you feel if you woke up as a citizen of Bell, California to find out that your city administrators are making salaries so far above the norm? In this small town located 5 miles away from Los Angeles, California they are steamed and rightly so.
The Los Angeles Times performed an investigation on the city payroll and found these unheard of six figure salaries for the top city administrators:
- Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia salary: $376,288/year
- Police Chief Randy Adams salary: $457,000/year
- Chief Administrative Office Robert Rizzo: $787,637/year
Bell, California is a small town of approximately 40,000 citizens in a 2.5 square mile zone. Most of the people in this town is made up of Latinos and 24% are below the poverty line.
In 2005, the city council placed "Measure A" on the ballot which exempted the city from state salary limits and converted it to a charter city. Since then, city council salaries have jumped over 50%.
City Government At Its Worst
Now whats the problem here? On one hand you have a group of greedy politicians with too much control. On the other you have a community that is too ignorant to know about what's going on in their city. Its a clear case of dumb versus dumber.
Consider only 1% of Bell's citizens voted on Measure A. One percent! Clearly this Measure was advertised in a very quite manner and kept low profile. When you have a city of that size and only 400 people voted, this is what happens.
Out of Whack City Salaries
Do those salary figures stack up fairly against the area of the city? A police administrator getting paid $457,000/year to cover such a small 2.5 mile zone is ridiculous, let alone the number of police staff (over 40). Why does this town need a team of 40+ police employees? Why not position four police squads on the extreme boundaries to cover a one mile zone and locate a squad in the center? What's that? 5 officers per shift? So you have 3 shifts at 8 hour rotations. Whats the math on that? 15 officers? Then add another 10 for dispatch and office duties serving 3 shifts. I count 25. If you ask me that is a total waste of taxpayer money.
To give you an idea of how messed up Bell salaries are, take a look a these samples pulled from much larger cities in California:
Chief Of Police Salaries
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San Jose, California (population: 964,695)
Square miles: 178
Salary: $215,000
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San Francisco, California (population: 808,976)
Square miles: 46
Salary: $224,942
-
Oakland, California (population: 404,155)
Square miles: 56
Salary: $211,3802
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Bell, California (population: 36,664)
Square miles: 2.5
Salary: $$457,000
The Citizens Are To Blame
Clearly, the citizens of Bell are so ignorant of what's going on that they have lost control of their city. Is this not a perfect example of what happens when nobody cares about their community and let greedy, corrupt politicians run it?
At the end of the day, the only finger to point at in this situation is the citizens themselves. They obviously are not monitoring the way their city government is being run. Clearly, they are too ignorant, too lazy. What's the reasoning behind this? You have a city inhabited by people from another country - too green to know what is going on. This is what happens to America when we let too many foreigners in from the border. They huddle into little communities of their own rarely reaching out to meld into the landscape. The people at the top see this and exploit ignorance, if not make a mockery of it.
This is a sad thing brewing here in America. When people lose their civic pride, they are exploited.
About Kerry Kobashi
Kerry is the founder of KerryOnWorld. He lives in Silicon Valley and has worked as an engineer and project manager. He owns Kobashi Computing a consulting company.
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