Freedom Line Blog

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is calling for all city, county and state employee salaries to be posted online for easy access by citizens.  Ordinarily, such a request wouldn’t merit a mention in a governor’s speech, but these aren’t ordinary times.  With California being home to 10 of the 12 highest unemployed metropolitan areas in the country, this is not the era to be paying salaries that total a million dollars in less than a decade to individual public employees.

The fallout from the City of Bell paying its top two city administrators plus the police chief a combined $1.6 million a year led to resignations from all three.  If media and prosecutorial scrutiny grows to include other municipalities, the taxpaying public will have a much better idea whom to blame for a good chunk of the state’s budget deficit: corrupt public officials and public employee unions.

Once CFIF reported on the outrageous compensation packages of top city officials in Bell, CA, the city council announced the following resignations just after midnight today: Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo ($787,637 annual salary); Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia ($376,288); and Police Chief Randy Adams ($457,000).

Although none of the three will get severance packages when they leave, all will get substantial taxpayer-funded pensions not to work.

Rizzo would be entitled to a state pension of more than $650,000 a year for life, according to calculations made by the Times. That would make Rizzo, 56, the highest-paid retiree in the state pension system.

Adams could get more than $411,000 a year.

Spaccia, 51, could be eligible for as much as $250,000 a year when she reaches 55, though the figure is less precise than for the other two officials, the Times said.

The reason these pensions are so high is simple.  In California, many state workers get pension awards based on their highest income earning year.  All the years of lower pay – decades’ worth! – are ignored.  Since the pension amount is a percentage of the worker’s best paid year, abuse is rampant.

Anyone familiar with the system knows a police officer, firefighter, state nurse or other public employee who arranges to get tons of overtime during their last 1 to 3 years of service.  Since overtime boosts a person’s highest annual income amount, it inflates the resulting pension percentage.  This allows thousands of California public employees to retire in their 50s making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year – for life – not to work.

In fact, that’s exactly the kind of retirement Bell Police Chief Randy Adams was enjoying when Bell officials approached him for the job.  Adams had retired as the police chief of Glendale, CA, and said he would only work for Bell if the city paid both his $165,000 annual salary and the amount he was making in retirement.  If we subtract $165,000 from his annual compensation of $457,000, we can see that Adams was making $262,000 a year in retirement.

This is insane.  The public employee unions who negotiate these kinds of ridiculous contracts – and the politicians who sign off on them – have corrupted both the budget process and the integrity of their offices.  A reckoning is coming at all levels of government for precisely this kind of behavior.  The “Bell Three” are just the first of many to be rung out of office.

H/T: FoxNews.com

If only the indicted former Illinois governor could have passed on the chance to be first elected official to do business with the Obama White House political machine he too might be just another “coincidence” in need of rationalizing.  At first, Blagojevich seemed to be a bad Sopranos version of a big state governor.  The hair, leather jackets, and the boyishly insincere claims of innocence made it easy to dismiss him as a buffoon unskilled in the art of negotiating political favors.  (FBI tapes of him dropping f-bombs while daydreaming about running a nonprofit or a cabinet department didn’t help either.)

Then came revelations that Democratic Senate candidates Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania and Andrew Romanoff of Colorado were offered varying types of political compensation not to run against Obama’s preferred incumbents.  Now it sounds as if Arlen Specter – the party switching moderate Sestak defeated – is signaling he’d like a sweetheart deal after Keystone State voters refused to renew his contract.

Sources tell ABC News that Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pennsylvania, has informed the White House that he would like to consider remaining in public service after his Senate term ends at the end of this session, and White House officials are keeping an open mind about possible job openings for him.

So, THAT’S the difference!  Blago should have “informed” the White House that “he would like to consider” increasing his public service to include Washington, D.C. – perhaps after the governor nominated President Obama’s friend Valerie Jarrett to fill his Senate seat.

Hey, distinctions are helpful.  They’re also dubious if the following report from ABC News is true about Specter’s motivation:

Some who know Specter say he’s eager to go out with a bang — to have a more majestic career-ender — and not to be known in perpetuity as a party switcher, an inquisitor of Anita Hill, or as a leading advocate on the Warren Commission of the single-bullet theory.

Because the mortgage giant’s former CEO Franklin Raines was trying to make yet another corrupt buck from his government perch.  After concluding his five year run as chief executive, Raines agreed to pay a nearly $25 million fine for Enron-style accounting gimmicks that netted he and other officers millions more in compensation.

Now, World Net Daily is reporting that Raines and others applied twice for the same residential cap-and-trade patent; the first time on behalf of Fannie Mae, the second time for themselves as private “inventors.”  Since the same people applied both times the second application supersedes the first, meaning any profits from the patent go not to Fannie Mae, but Raines & Co.

These distinctions matter because Raines – acting in his capacity as head of Fannie Mae – initially claimed to apply for the patent in order to give the mortgage backer a strong position in encouraging more “green” housing.  That claim proved phony when his second application guaranteed him a windfall if “comprehensive reform” ever came in the form of cap-and-trade legislation.

Sound familiar?  CFIF readers will recall a recent column discussing the same kind of self-enrichment in Obama’s Energy Department, and another analyzing the government’s inability to run any enterprise – and specifically Fannie Mae – like a business.

Who knew we’d get an example that combined them so soon?

Apparently trying to contain the damage from last week’s blowup over allegations that the White House used President Clinton as the middleman in an attempt to bribe Rep. Joe Sestak out of the Pennsylvania senate race, the Obama Administration is now leaking that they did something similar in Colorado. From the AP:

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration dangled the possibility of a government job for former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff last year in hopes he would forgo a challenge to Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, officials said Wednesday, just days after the White House admitted orchestrating a job offer in the Pennsylvania Senate race.

These officials declined to specify the job that was floated or the name of the administration official who approached Romanoff, and said no formal offer was ever made. They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not cleared to discuss private conversations.

Romanoff is mounting a primary challenge to Senator Michael Bennet in the Centennial State’s Democratic primary, which won’t be held until August 10. By leaking this information now, the Obama Administration looks to be cynically trying to avoid a repeat of the Sestak controversy as the Colorado race progresses. With two months left and a candidate who has thus far been more tight-lipped than Sestak, the odds are against them. And while this may feed widespread notions of administration corruption, it also has the potential to divide Democrats who resent the White House choosing sides within the Democratic Party. Stay tuned: this could get interesting.

In these week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses how President Obama and his allies have sacrificed both sound policy and basic ethics in their push for government-controlled health care.

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino comments on how the culture of corruption in Washington has gotten worse, not better, under Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s leadership.  Watch the video below.