The Miami Herald asks: Will voter revolt bring change at Miami-Dade County hall?
Our answer: only if charter reform comes together with pension reform.
Take the example of George Burgess who quit the County after the results of the recall election. According to the Herald, Burgess:
"will be paid severance of one year of base salary, $326,340, plus deferred compensation of $22,000.County Mayor Carlos Alvarez will also receive a similar golden parachute package after his ouster.
"The 52-year-old career bureaucrat and his family will get medical and dental coverage until he’s 65 years old, under a county “Departure Incentive Program’’ that is available to select employees.
"Unused sick time of about $79,892 and accumulated vacation pay of about $78,777 will be included in his next paycheck, according to the county human resources director Mary Lou Rizzo.
"During the one-year severance period — which runs March 21, 2011, to March 18, 2012 — he will also get an expense allowance of $3,000 a month and a car allowance of $600 a month. Burgess opted to return the car the county leased on his behalf, but he’s still entitled to the car allowance.
"And he will get an annual sum of $10,000 in executive benefits, paid out biweekly over the coming year. For 2012, he’s entitled to one final $8,000 payment to cover the premiums on a life insurance policy and a disability policy; he’s already gotten that annual payment for 2011, said Rizzo."
When such lavish packages are bestowed on private sector executives upon retirement, the press usually decries them, especially in the wake of the financial crisis that engulfed Wall Street in the last few years. Yet, there is no such sentiment when the Mayor, County Commissioner, and County Manager walk out of County Hall hundreds of thousands of dollars richer.
The Herald's Myriam Marquez weighs in. "I’m not among the voters who want to deny the pair [Alvarez and Seijas] — or, for that matter, County Manager George Burgess, who resigned a day after the recall — their pensions. They made whoppers of bad decisions, but there was no proof they were crooked."
Is this the standard to which we hold our elected officials?
Ms. Marquez along with so many others fails to realize that while the great majority of public servants are not "crooked," their bad decisions affect each one of our wallets directly. Add to that the moral imperative when Alvarez and Burgess wreak havoc on County government through their lax financial oversight and reckless spending only to walk away richer in the process, and you can see why we need pension reform now.
It is now time for charter reform to include the elephant in the room which is the exorbitant salaries and pensions we all pay for those who call themselves our servants. Time to align the public sector with the private, and put public workers on 401(k) or other similar investment plans that the rest of us have.
The greatest luxury that Alvarez and Burgess had while in office was not the taxpayer funded cars, or any of the other perks that have riled so many into voting for the recall.
Their greatest luxury was knowing that no matter how many bad decisions, or how costly their decisions were to the taxpayers, those same taxpayers would be on the hook for their costly lifetime pensions, giving them the luxury of not ever having to worry about their retirement future.
