In fairness, and to be sure we have “good and able” public officials, we believe in providing them “reasonable pay” for their public services, don’t we?
For example, our United States senators and members of the U.S. House of Representatives get “base pay” of $174,000.
While that’s certainly more than most ordinary citizens make, we want our members of Congress to be competent people. And they have to cover the extra costs of living in Washington as well as maintaining homes in their local districts.
In addition to their salaries, members of Congress are eligible to receive retirement and medical benefits. That seems reasonable, doesn’t it?
But compared with the pay and benefits for officials in Bell, Calif., that’s “chicken feed”!
Had you even heard of Bell until recently?
Bell is a town of only about 38,000 people, most of them Hispanic. It is 10 miles southeast of Los Angeles. Bell’s population is not too much over one-tenth the size of Hamilton County’s population. But Bell has been “in the news” recently because of the big pay that some of its officials had been getting.
For example, Bell’s city manager had a salary of $787,637 – plus retirement, medical, vacation and other benefits that ran his total compensation package up to more than $1.5 million a year!
Among those benefits were reported to be 107 vacation days, 36 sick-pay days and a pension prospect of more than $600,000.
Then Bell’s assistant city manager reportedly had a salary of $376,288, with benefits that more than doubled his package to $845,960!
Well, when some of those figures got public attention recently, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office began looking into the situation. Some of the pay was cut and some officials began resigning.
We don’t have a city manager or assistant city manager in Chattanooga. And we don’t have exorbitant salaries and benefits for any of our local public officials, either.