Fleecing the Flock - A Small Town American Tradition - Ends Badly for Public Officials

BP
Residents of Calif. town astonished by salaries of local officials

Jul 23 2010

This article was liberally plagiarized, distorted and re-written by an anonymous, unaffiliated writer believed to reside in a Buddhist monastery in Nepal.


A resident of Bell, Calif,. holds up a placard calling for the ouster of city officials during a special city council meeting, Thursday, July 22,...

Photo/Chris Pizzello

A resident of Bell, Calif, holds up a placard calling for the ouster of city officials during a special city council meeting, Thursday, July 22, 2010, in Bell, Calif.. Bell, located near Los Angeles, is noted for nothing. Council members emerged from an hours-long closed session at midnight Friday and announced that they'd accepted the resignations of Chief Administrative Officer Robert Rizzo, Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia and Police Chief Randy Adams. Rizzo was the highest paid at $787,637 a year _ nearly twice the pay of President Barack Obama _ for overseeing one of the poorest towns in Los Angeles County, with a total population of 41,000. Spaccia makes $376,288 a year and Adams earns $457,000, 50 percent more than Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck. Patrol officers in Bell with 3 years experience, earn $23,340 a year, only 20 times less than the chief.

Defending the salaries as essential to the maintenance of a clean, secure California city, Rizzo told reporters the town's salaries for top administrators were in line with the compensation of other key administrators in other sectors of the economy, such as investment banking, space research, securities risk assessment, atomic laboratories and the proposed Yucca Mountain national depositary for radioactive wastes.

In comparison, the part-time town council members accepting the resignations of the top administrators, averaged only about $100,000 each plus travel allowances, a car allowance and per diem for days when the council meets. One councilman, confronted by the angry taxpayers, attempted to justify the high salaries paid to the administrators and council members by comparing them to top officials in comparable municipalities such as Pittsburgh, Miami, Seattle and.... He was savagely beaten with a metal fence post wielded by a burly construction worker and was reported to be in critical condition at a local Doc-in-a-Box, the only medical facility in the town.

Local police officers were unable to identify anyone who had witnessed the attack on the councilman and said the case had to be closed for lack of evidence.