02-25-09, Richard Dickinson’s Evaluation of the 2008 100K Club Information

Dear Mr. Weber:

Your website is helping provide a forum for Glendale citizens. Thank you.

 Using the 2008 data that several people sent to me about Glendale's 100K Club, I cleaned up the data, reformatted it slightly and looked at the data in several different ways.

 1. Summary, 2. Sorted by Wages, 3. Sorted by Job Classification and Sorted by Name.

There is much useful information here. The staggering thing is the number of people who are earning more than $100k as a pct. of the total Glendale labor force. 

Glendale is just one of 88 cities in Los Angeles County. 

In fact Glendale even appears to have "apprentices" in a couple job classes who are earning more than $100,000 a year. As Apprentices!

Over $80 million is paid to the top 595 Glendale employees.  Moreover, this is only their "direct wages." It does not include various job perks, non-financial benefits, health and dental costs, or their retirement. Retirement that can give some retirees at age 50 a pension totaling 90% of their highest earnings for life, plus health and medical. These costs are not sustainable.

Glendale city employees seem to be paid significantly above the norm when you compare these top wage earners with the earnings of public and private employees in the broad spectrum of job classifications monitored by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics for the L.A./Glendale region.

Glendale utility bills are among the highest in California. In part this is because the City of Glendale is transferring money from Water, Power and other enterprise funds to the General Fund to pay very generous wages.

To sustain the high salaries, fees are also creeping into every aspect of Glendale life. The examples that come to mind are the attempt last year to hike fees for the youth sports leagues that use Glendale recreational facilities, and of course the more recent effort by Glendale to charge for parking from 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Brand Boulevard. 

The bubble in property tax revenue that Glendale received over the last five years or so did not get plowed into better services, expanded infrastructure, more cops and firefighters, and a host of improvements. Instead, much of that bubble revenue went into extremely lucrative multi-year wage guarantees for Glendale employees. Wage guarantees that Glendale taxpayers will have to continue to support. Even after the effects of the housing bubble collapse and the County Tax Assessor reduces the value of some Glendale properties. 

No, what seems clear to me is that Glendale has built an unsustainable budget, and the current crop of elected City Council members has dirty hands because they have hiked fees, approved multi-year labor agreements, and failed to think about long-term consequences and sustainability for the city budget.

We need new blood on the city council.

Sincerely,

Richard Dickinson 

Note: Reply from Mr. Dickinson regarding his experience with municipal budgets:

Hal:

I retired as the Chief Administrative Analyst. I worked in municipal government for over 30 years, most of which time was spent at the City of Los Angeles.  As a member of the non-partisan City Administrative Officer (CAO) staff, I managed teams of budget analysts engaged in analyzing the overall city budget, preparing analyses on the budget, contracts, programs, revenue rates, bond issues, etc.  We served the mayor and city council, and provided them with facts and professional advice and recommendations on matters that came before them. 

Richard Dickinson