Desert Hot Springs, California is in trouble.
Turn north, and you make your way up an arid stretch of road to a battered city where empty storefronts outnumber shops, the Fire Department has been closed, City Hall is on a four-day week and the dwindling coffers may be empty by spring.
Why? I’ll give you one guess.
Here, under the budget enacted last spring, about $7 million of the city’s $10.6 million annual payroll went to the 39-member police force. The situation was so dire that an audit, compiled weeks before municipal elections in November but not made public until later, showed that Desert Hot Springs was $4 million short for the year and would run out of money as early as April 2014.
Last week, the city cut all municipal salaries, including those of the police, by 22 percent. The city also capped “incentive pay” and cut back on holiday and vacation days. Naturally, the police officer’s association is stating these cuts are illegal.
Police officers here, as in many California cities, can retire as young as 50 with 30 years of service and receive 90 percent of their final salary every year — drawing those pensions for decades. Police unions say the fault lies with state and local politicians who failed to adequately fund the pension system over the years, and inflated benefits during boom years. Others wonder whether such salaries and pensions were ever affordable, particularly in cities as small and struggling as this. In Desert Hot Springs, for example, for every dollar that the city pays its police officers, another 36 cents must be sent to Calpers to fund their pensions.
Desert Hot Springs has a current population of around 27,000.
The average pay and benefits package for a police officer here had been worth $177,203 per year, in a city where the median household income was $31,356 in 2011, according to the Census Bureau. All of this had gone largely unnoticed until becoming the center of debate during the recent municipal election.
Oh, and by the way: Desert Hot Springs filed for bankruptcy in 2001, and is still making payments on a $10 million civil judgment against the city.
But, you know, the police aren’t the only people who get large salaries.
An examination of tax records, contracts and other documents by The New York Times found that hefty stagehand salaries at many New York nonprofit performance institutions are more widespread than was previously known.
You don’t say.
At nine top such institutions that have contracts with Local 1, stagehands make up 36 of the 98 most highly compensated employees, or about 37 percent. The average annual total salary and benefits of those highest-paid stagehands, at places from the Metropolitan Opera to the Roundabout Theater Company, is nearly $310,000, according to the nonprofits’ most recent tax filings.
That’s good money. I wonder when they can put in for retirement.
Backstage workers can earn more than the onstage talent. Five stagehands at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center were each paid more in total compensation in 2011 than the highest-paid dancer at New York City Ballet, filings showed. And, in 2010, “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” paid its stagehands a total of $138,000 a week, while the principals and members of the ensemble earned slightly less than $100,000 put together, according to documents submitted to the state attorney general’s office.
The paper of record seems to want readers to be shocked and appalled at how much stagehands are paid. Personally, I’m glad to hear that they’re making big money; I think they have every right to negotiate lucrative contracts with their employers, and I don’t see any reason to be indignant that “the four top stagehands at the Metropolitan Opera earned more than $500,000 each in total compensation (including retirement and other benefits), tax filings showed.“
This entry was posted on Saturday, December 28th, 2013 at 7:35 am and is filed under California Über Alles, Clippings, Cops, Law, Theatre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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The thing to be indignant about is that, as a closed-shop unionized business, stagehands are not required to compete in the free market for their jobs.
Also, in the case of the Met, they have been the recipients of taxpayer subsidies in the past, though I am unclear if such subsidies make up their current operating budget.