(Associated Press)
Over the years, this mild-mannered reporter has been called many nasty names and belittled by many unflattering adjectives. Denounced as a shrew, likened to a snake, accused of “pension envy” — and now, alas, of engaging in “ragebait.”
We’ve been touring through public pay and pension data as of late — always popular with readers and unpopular with public officials — and were finally done with the piece about city manager pay, which posted online on Friday. We were grooving at the awesome Fete de la Musique celebration in downtown Laguna Beach on Saturday afternoon when the cell phone buzzed with an incoming email.
“Good afternoon, Ms. Sforza,” said Ventura City Councilman Mike Johnson. “More than a dozen people forwarded your recent column on city manager salaries, because you claim Ventura is paying the City Manager over $500k in salary, plus benefits. That’s just not true. Our city manager is paid $297k/year plus ~$75k in benefits…. Please issue a correction.”
We sat down on the curb. We checked the numbers for the umpteenth time in the state controller’s database, where all the pay numbers we work with come from. What we published was correct.
We reminded City Councilman Johnson that, as the story clearly stated, the latest data from the controller was from 2022, not today. Ventura’s city manager must have left that year and cashed out wads of unused leave time or somesuch. Yes, there it was in the database: Regular pay of $272,064, “lump sum” pay of $216,883, and “other pay” of $18,688, for total wages of $507,635. (That’s the number included on Box 5 of W-2 forms for good old Uncle Sam, in case you’re wondering. Like, real money.)
Add in what the city spent on health and retirement benefits for the city manager that year ($95,878), and you get total compensation of $603,513.
Johnson confirmed the broad sequence of events: “2022, we let our city manager go in December, and he had a severance package and we wrote him a check for a settlement,” he said by email.
Indeed, that’s often how these big payouts work, we responded; there’s nothing to correct. We’re sorry if this is the first time you’re seeing these numbers, but they’re what the city reported to the state.
We thought that would be the end of it. But no.
“The ragebait is even mightier than the pen,” he shot back. “If the point of your column was to say, fire your City Manager during the first quarter of the year, maybe your editor cut that paragraph out. Because that’s why you’re tarring my city. And, perhaps, other cities. We find ourselves with a politician trying to hold a columnist to a higher standard. Congratulations. May Saint Edward R Murrow grant your wish for an endless stream of angry Facebook emojis.”
Um. Huh? The city manager would have earned less base pay, but received much the same severance payout, if the departure happened in the first quarter as opposed to the last quarter of the year.
Tarring the city?! This is what the city paid the city manager that year. When public officials cast hard, cold, straight facts that originate from the city as “tarring,” we find that a bit alarming.
The city councilman then took to social media — where we had posted a link to the city manager pay story — and repeated his objections. We repeated our explanation. And on Monday, we asked him to expound on precisely why he thinks that reporting to the public what the city reported to the state is objectionable.
“We only made your list because we fired our city manager late in the year, not because our pay and benefits are out of line with comparable cities,” Johnson said. “We don’t pay $500k/year. That was a one-off that wouldn’t have shown up on your list if we’d fired him earlier in the year. It also wouldn’t have made your list if you used data from any other year.”
This is true for every city that fires/retires a city manager in every year it happens. Ventura wasn’t the only one to do that in 2022, as our story detailed. We also heard from folks in Palmdale, where in 2022 the city manager had quite a haul (total comp of $734,654) after a sordid soap opera-sort of exit. The new city manager, who makes a fraction of her predecessor, has regretfully received some very ugly messages.
Apparently, it’s much the same in Ventura.
“His severance pay wasn’t for being a city manager,” Councilman Johnson told us about the former city manager. “It was a closed session decision in response to potential litigation, whether we wanted to drag the whole thing into court to prove we had cause to fire him. He was on leave and not coming back when we made that decision. By definition, he’s no longer the city manager when we write him a check for severance. He’s a potential plaintiff.”
(iStockphoto)
Noted. But — news flash folks — firing people costs money. In these cases, public money. Let’s duly note that the new city managers do not make nearly as much money as the fired/retired folks they’ve replaced, and when we get the next batch of data this fall, we’ll repeat this exercise with the latest numbers.
Note that those “new” numbers will be from 2023, so they’ll still be old. We look forward to the day when data for all 480+ cities is posted in real time, rather than with such a lag. What we have is not ideal, but it beats the heck out of what we had 15 years ago, which was nothing.
Anyway, we did hear a lot about the larger issue of city manager pay from dogged local government watcher Fred Smoller, associate professor of political science at Chapman University.
“City councils are caught between a rock and a hard place — unionized public employees, especially police and fire, who insist on better compensation — and voters who demand services and resist higher taxes to pay for them. Cities have responded by privatizing service delivery, permitting auto malls and big box stores to generate tax revenue,” he said.
It’s not that some city managers make too much money; it’s that there are too many city managers, Smoller said. More than half of the residents of Orange County live in eight cities, while the remainder of the county’s population lives in 26 other cities. Each has a city manager.
Is that really necessary? Smoller said we need to move past our “city centric” approach to service delivery and reinvent government at all levels. Transportation, crime, housing affordability, homelessness and climate change — all are issues that transcend city boundaries.
“This new “OC 2.0” would be calibrated to the 21st century, not the 19th century when the county was created,” Smoller said.
The stable of city managers in OC 2.0 would be leaner and meaner, too.
Related Articles
Mission Viejo rejects plans for a new DMV over safety and traffic concerns
Anaheim will use pandemic bonds, reserves to shore up city budget until 2027
Proposed pay raises, benefits for police would cost Santa Ana $27 million over 3.5 years
Is your city manager one of 14 in California to make $500,000? Find out
Despite budget crisis, Orange will save community events, hire police and fire — for now
Leave a Reply