L.A. Government Workers Payroll Outrage

The L.A. Daily News has this editorial outrage:

Two points are made starkly clear by the information in today's Daily News stories about Los Angeles city salaries. The first is that much of the city's budget deficit can be directly attributed to soaring public-employee wages. The second is that city leaders knew they were putting L.A. into future financial jeopardy by agreeing to payroll raises last year - but did so anyhow.

Now that the city is facing a $406 million deficit for the fiscal year beginning in July, officials are suddenly feigning shock, as if the economic slowdown came as a total surprise. But the evidence shows quite clearly that economists and budget experts warned Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the City Council about the looming economic slowdown more than a year ago.

Nonetheless, city leaders pushed up payroll costs - through an overly generous new contract and through programmatic salary "step" increases - by about $120 million last year. This, even though L.A.'s municipal workers are already the best compensated in the entire country.

Even now, when it's no longer possible to deny the economic slowdown, city leaders still aren't thinking about ways to contain payroll costs. Instead, they're focusing on building revenue - that is, finding new fees, taxes and other hidden costs to wring out of the public.

This is not a responsible way to operate a government.

Payroll costs for Los Angeles' 48,000 municipal employees account amount to $3.5billion, a number far too large for most non-economists to comprehend. That's why the Daily News has broken city salaries down to the employee, with the information available in a searchable database available at www.dailynews.com.

California law specifically notes that public-employee salaries are public information. Furthermore, when public officials make bad fiduciary decisions, the public has a right to know how its money is being misspent - down to the penny.

For example, figures in the billions might not bring home city leaders' bad choices in the same way as will the knowledge that some 6,000 city workers are paid between $100,000 and $200,000 a year - including two dozen members of the mayor's staff.

Then there are L.A.'s ranks of privately employed plumbers, machinists and painters, who ought to know that their taxes go to pay city government plumbers', machinists' and painters' salaries that are worth tens of thousands of dollars more per year than their own.

And with trash fees tripling over two years, it's instructive to know that those funds go to support the 158 employees at the Bureau of Sanitation who are paid more than $100,000 a year.

Civil service is out of whack in Los Angeles, and it will be as long as public-employee unions wield more political influence than the public itself.

Don't just be outraged; act on it. Armed with the information from this series, Angelenos ought to demand that their elected officials begin to correct imbalance of power.

Use the contact information below to call on city leaders before they try to squeeze even one more penny from the public.