Friday, June 18, 2004
More budget musings...
People who care are trying to find ways to save important services in these tight financial times, and rightly so... of course, everyone feels their particular program/service/department is the most worthy.. and it's up to the Supes to juggle the few dollars and see if they can save a couple.
I'm surprised that no sitting supervisor... or especially 'outgoing' supervisors don't ever bring up the salary of city workers question. I guess it's the big elephant in the room no one wants to mention.
People bring up the Supervisor salary, a healthy $90K, and some think that's too much. I don't... they work hard, but there's a lot of other city jobs out there that pay a bunch more than Supervisor. I've been trying to find some good comparisons, between cities and salaries. You know what would be interesting? a comparison between Boston City salaries and SF... or Sydney's, or even Chicago's.
Here's what I could find from last summer, before Brown left office. This is from 'Beyond Chron' :
- New jobs: Since taking office in 1996, Brown has added 3,900 employees to the city workforce.
-- Healthy raises: Under Brown, most city workers have gotten raises of at least 30 percent. Police officers' and firefighters' salaries have gone up 37. 5 percent -- and the cops will get even more under a just-negotiated four-year contract.
-- Overall pay: According to a recent report by the Board of Supervisors' budget analyst, the average city worker earned $70,506 last year, when premium pay and overtime were included.
This past year alone, the number of city workers whose pay topped $100,000 rose to 2,600.
Even veteran patrol officers pulled in an average of $103,000 last year when overtime was factored in.
And what goes up -- goes up even higher in the upper ranks.
Among city executives, the highest paid was David Kushner. The deputy director of the city's retirement system clocked in at $236,031.
Next up, Controller Ed Harrington, who made $212,478 -- followed by Airport Director John Martin at $212,178 and Public Health Director Dr. Mitch Katz, at $209,512.
Brown got $163,948 -- dropping him to 55th on the city's top pay list.
wow. We had 2600 people making over $100K? That's $260,000,000 in salary alone? Then add benefits? Am I doing that math wrong?
Even if Mayor Newsom has managed to find a way to fire/cut/retire/reduce half that number, that's still $130mil a year in overly nice pay.
So, just for fun, what if we pulled all those salaries down to $90K? Take an average of the 'over 100K', just picking $110K as the average we're paying now, saving that $20K mulitplied by 2600 = $52million. That's without losing one job, and still paying about $20K over the average city employee in the Bay Area. hm...
Can I mention that in District 5, the median household annual income is $36K? And I think in the city of San Francisco, according to the 2000 census, it's $55K.
and the Supervisors are fighting over $5mil here and there to save incredibly important stuff like mental health services? Why won't they say anything about the elephant, no, the cash cow, sitting in the room?
