It is my hope that we can move beyond the
number crunching and start proposing solutions. Publicizing the $100k club
information makes for great press and gets a lot of people fired up, but
realistic and workable solutions are not easy to come by. Most of the
excessive salaries appear to be related to overtime expenses of hourly
employees—when a police officer earns more than a department head or attorney
for the city it doesn’t make sense otherwise.
It is time for critics to step up and
offer solutions that are workable. As much as many would like to fire the
lot and start fresh, it isn’t going to happen. The city can’t rewrite
contracts over night and probably can’t eliminate overtime rules without a
comprehensive plan. We also can’t address the issue of comparable salary
data as a tool for setting salaries without working with neighboring
communities to come up with a different approach.
·
I would like to see an elimination of
overtime for employees that could be classified as managers.
·
I would like to eliminate staff infill for
fire department personnel and simply have
·
I would like to require that all employees
serve in a position for 2 years before being used as a basis for
pensions.
·
I would like to have pension payouts start
at a reasonable retirement age—close to 60—rather than simply after 20 years of
service.
·
I would like to have a health care system
that works for everyone so that the city doesn’t have to fund a costly Medicare
replacement program.
·
I would like to see the fire and police
department aggressively recruit and mentor Glendale residents to join the
ranks, preferably among the Korean and Armenian populations so that they start
looking like Glendale—recruitment is NOT affirmative action, by the way.
None
of this will happen overnight.
None
of it will happen in the next city council term and progress will be slow and
require the participation of the state and neighboring communities. Any
candidate who claims to have a solution, knows where the bones are buried (yet
hasn’t dug any up), or simply pledges to vote against budgets and employment
contracts is full of crap.
None
of these are solutions and none
are going to get us out of this box. It will take several years to move
the city towards an employment policy that starts to resemble a private sector
approach.
Until we get council members that are
willing to come up with some new approaches to how we govern, approaches that
can get buy-in from city employees, we are going to get the same crew on
council that managed to cut the kind of moronic deals we signed with the
Americana at Brand.
It doesn’t have to be me,
this is NOT an appeal for votes. But if I see any more analysis of ‘the
numbers’ without some realistic ideas for solutions—sober, realistic
solutions—I am going to throw up.
And firing 25% of the fire department and
replacing them with Boy Scout volunteers is just stupid. Bruce needs to
rework his plan.
I am not a front runner and can afford to
speak my mind.
Michael Teahan