A dozen years ago a cavernous City Hall was constructed to assuage visions of grandeur. The monument remains an echo chamber, although the State Controller’s Public Pay Report shows 271 employees. Is the total cost of those employees excessive for a city like Mission Viejo?
In contrast, the Controller reports Rancho Santa Margarita has 40 employees for its likewise safe, highly rated community. MV City Treasurer Cheryl Dyas explains the employee counts are based on the number of W-2′s issued, so they include seasonal and part-time workers, which are heavily used by MV.
RSM only comprises 13.1 square miles compared to MV’s 19, and has half the population. Dyas objects to the RSM comparison, asserting RSM has more of its infrastructure, including parks, provided by homeowner associations; and RSM has 99 miles of roads to maintain compared to MV’s 228. But work for parks and roads is performed by private contractors in both MV and RSM, and so is not included in the cost of City employees on the chart below. However, Dyas says fewer administrative employees are necessary in Rancho Santa Margarita to solicit and oversee those contracts.
The numbers in the following chart are posted online by the Controller’s Office, which creates uniform public pay reports for all cities. The chart compares Mission Viejo and its four adjacent cities. All five are largely administrative in nature. They are known as “contract cities,” using private vendors to provide many services. Therefore the chart’s wages do not include major services such as police, fire, landscaping, street asphalt, streetsweeping, etc.
The MV Animal Shelter and Library are anomalies, because MV employees provide those services, while the other four cities contract for those services. Adjustments for those two factors would reduce Wages per Resident for MV on the chart by about $28.
The adjustments for the Animal Shelter and Library bring MV in line with Laguna Niguel on a cost-per-resident basis. But the elephant in the analysis is MV’s economy-of-scale, based on its larger population. Shouldn’t that advantage yield a significantly lower cost-per-resident than smaller cities? That result is missing.
The Controller’s Report also lists all MV employee positions, including respective salaries and benefits. The Council last month adopted a 2.5% increase in wages for employees, although there will be an increase in employee contributions toward pension benefits. The City currently has an unfunded pension liability of over $9 million.
Mission Viejo is preparing a new two-year budget which will take effect July 1.
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By measures used of dollars/wages per resident it would appear Mr. City Manager has fallen a sleep, or just retired without notifying the council.
This information is useless without a list of all employees showing their duties and pay.
[Editor's Note: That info was included at the link in the article. Just scroll down.]
Thanks for the pointing out the link.
Wow! It seems obvious that the pay for those on the first two pages should be cut in half, and that pay for the following pages should be no more than 70% of the amounts now being paid, with the defined benefit plan eliminated. There are hundreds of thousands of qualified people in southern California who would be happy to work at those lower rates.
Greed and mismanagement by the City Manager have produced to date an approximately 10 M unfunded pension liability for the City of Mission Viejo.
In addition to the last year’s City budget deficit of 5.35 million dollars and the unfunded leave time compensation of 1.7 M, and other such as the 1 million dog park, are adding up to the sub par performance for this City Manager and this City Council. In Orange County, such liabilities threaten the financial solvency of our cities. While there are others, behind one of the problems is the City’s retirement and pension program.
Just looking into firing the City Manager for his lack of performance, Mr. Wilberg in addition to his pension, gets nine months severance pay plus $21,287 in unpaid leave for a total of $169,573. Remember, his severance is based on his base salary, without benefits and perks. The City’s lavish pension agreements, and CALPERS yielding only 1%, as well as the recent 2.5 % City Council approved pension-spiking have become a real threat to the City’s reserves.
This City Council has proven again that it is in a spending mode of our hard earned tax dollars, and if they don’t have the will and ability to negotiate downward the pension-spiking techniques, then they will likely end up with the City holding an empty bag and an AAA credit rating.
Have you ever noticed that on any of this cities projects there is always one guy working and five or six more standing around watching him work. The other day on Trabuco they were fixing a curb and four supervisors(?) were all watching the one guy working. No wonder every city project is over budget and late on its finish date.