Maybe you can help me decipher this.
I am a longstanding resident of Culver City, and I have watched the city function for many, many years.
Why is it necessary for the City Manager’s office to have salaries totaling the half-million dollar mark annually.
As far back as I know, the city’s population has been around 40,000. Back in the day, a Chief Administrative Officer and a secretary ran the city, and ran it very well.
Remember Dale Jones? Or Jody Hall Esser?
Now looking at the budget on line, we have a city manager, an assistant city manager, an assistant to the assistant city manager, a management analyst, and numerous clerical positions.
Looking for waste? I have a suggestion.
When you read the headlines of teacher layoffs and furlough days and elected City Council people entertaining drastic cuts in public safety, it makes you wonder:
Are we really cutting the fat?
Seems like John Nachbar, the City Manager, is not getting with the program. Sounds like are city does have some similarities to the city of Bell, mismanagement at the top!
Mr. Robertson may be contacted at JR@verison.net
Ari Noonan responds: Which would you rather be, City Manager of Culver City, Mayor of Los Angeles or Governor of California? If you want power, prestige and daily visibility, you will choose the latter two. But if size of salary matters, you will run to City Hall. The City Manager’s salary (not including benefits package) is $75,000 more a year than Gov. Brown and about $50,000 more than Mayor Villaraigosa’s.
The governor might say that is all right because he always has lived frugally. The mayor, by contrast, has lived morally frugally.
Frugality aside, City Hall would tell you it is necessary to pay lofty salaries to their top tier executives to remain competitive for the best talent. As for the multiplication of City Hall bodies compared with the old good days, a truncated response is that government has become infinitely more complicated than in Ms. Hall Esser’s time and a bundle more than when Mr. Jones retired to Arizona.
A more candid explanation:
Government has calculatedly become a staggeringly dense, impenetrable jungle of obligatory hires, marginal hires and junk hires — routinely dedicated to keeping the personnel wheels greased and all of their political/ideological allies employed and solvent for the rest of their lives. There are, of course, many worthy persons in government service. However, for a boatload on the payroll, their absence would not be noticed if they sailed to Tahiti for a year or two. We need a Dept. of Education — state of federal? We need a Lieutenant Governor? We need an Environmental “Protection” Agency? We need protection from the environmentalist extremists, which is 95 percent of that underemployed crowd. Build an asylum around the thousands of needless government agencies. You couldn’t distinguish it from a standard mental hospital.
