The impact of transparency
More great examples this week of the importance of transparency in government, all made possible as a result of California’s Public Records Act.
The Press-Enterprise continued their outstanding investigative reporting by following up on our finding that a Riverside utilities dispatcher tripled his salary to nearly $400,000 due to overtime.
In Riverside officials knew since 2015 about soaring overtime that exceeded some utility workers’ regular pay, the paper dug deeper into the underlying issues, revealing that the practice caused at least some stuff to raise alarm bells years in advance of our report, which unfortunately went unheeded. A slice:
The utility’s large overtime tab in the electric operations division grew steadily beginning around 2012, but it became noticeable in 2015.
In June that year, the emails show that one dispatcher sent colleagues an email with the subject line, “Overtime and REST TIME in DANGER,” in which he proposed they all make suggestions on how to trim overtime costs before management did it for them.
One employee responded: “We have a contract. They have to honor it. … Don’t think stuff up for them.”
In March 2016, Electric Field Manager Ron Cox wrote to Utilities Principal Analyst Shelly Almgren to explain why the electric division had exceeded its overtime budget three months before the end of the fiscal year.
Read the full article here.
In other news, our CalPERS 2016 release received quite comprehensive coverage, as shown below:
Thanks to the tireless Jack Dean and his Pension Tsunami website for compiling the above!
All of this reporting then led to a fantastic Santa Cruz Sentinel editorial, California taxpayers pay high cost for public employee pensions, which observed that:
… something is out of whack in our state, where government pensions, benefits and salaries are far beyond what most working people in the private sector could ever hope for.
A keen observation. While defenders of public pay extol their high pay as a virtue that others should seek to replicate, it is neither fair nor sustainable when that high pay comes at the expense of those earning much less.
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