{"id":6648,"date":"2010-08-18T14:47:52","date_gmt":"2010-08-18T18:47:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=6648"},"modified":"2010-08-18T14:47:52","modified_gmt":"2010-08-18T18:47:52","slug":"city-of-bell-corruption-impacting-other-cities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/6648\/city-of-bell-corruption-impacting-other-cities\/","title":{"rendered":"City of Bell Corruption Impacting Other Cities"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a year or two, we may look back on the City of Bell <a href=\"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/index.php\/commentary\/61-state-issues\/688-a-tale-of-two-california-cities-provides-bellwether-for-golden-states-future \" target=\"_blank\">public employee compensation scandal<\/a> as the modern day equivalent of Upton Sinclair\u2019s <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Jungle\" target=\"_blank\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\">The Jungle<\/span><\/a>.\u00a0 Both stories showed the general public how bad a particular industry behaved, and prompted serious, far-reaching reforms.<\/p>\n<p>The chief villain in the Bell fiasco (so far) is its former city manager Robert Rizzo.\u00a0 At the time of his resignation, Rizzo was making close to $800,000 a year, and due to earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from his public employee pension.\u00a0 Now that he\u2019s retired, the pension is kicking in \u2013 and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.allbusiness.com\/government\/government-bodies-offices-regional\/14893077-1.html \" target=\"_blank\">so are taxpayers in cities that share Bell\u2019s pension pool<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>That means that Hesperia, CA, is on the hook for $80,000 of Rizzo\u2019s estimated $600,000 a year pension (not to work!), even though it fired Rizzo after his four year stint ended in 1992.\u00a0 Taxpayers in Rancho Cucamonga will be paying $160,000 of the bill, with Bell and other cities who never even hired Rizzo chipping in the rest.<\/p>\n<p>And remember, the estimated $600,000 is owed to Rizzo \u2013 by law \u2013 every year for the rest of his life.\u00a0 After being fired by at least two of the cities that hired him.\u00a0 Insane.\u00a0 Public employee pension reform may not be a \u201csexy\u201d issue on the campaign stump, but it is certainly a topic that is sure to get people\u2019s attention during this era of runaway government spending.<\/p>\n<p>The Bell scandal may be the the last, best chance to reign in the power of the public employee unions before they ruin the American economy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a year or two, we may look back on the City of Bell public employee compensation scandal as the modern day equivalent of Upton Sinclair\u2019s The Jungle.\u00a0 Both stories showed the general public how bad a particular industry behaved, and prompted serious, far-reaching reforms. The chief villain in the Bell fiasco (so far) is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[70,299,1717,351,1588,761,1722,1721],"class_list":["post-6648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-budget","tag-california","tag-city-of-bell","tag-corruption","tag-pension","tag-public-employee-unions","tag-the-jungle","tag-upton-sinclair"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6648"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6648\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6650,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6648\/revisions\/6650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}