Hat Man: Rift in pay is a rift in reality

County employees gain while the rest of us wilt

I know I’m not the only person who notices the jarring disconnect between the sunny financial predictions that come from top economists and bankers and the reality here in the Mother Lode. I was relieved when Enterprise columnist Ken Johnson noted it in his column on Aug. 22.

In some ways, it is old news that the elites in Washington, D.C., New York and San Francisco live in artificial prosperity bubbles disconnected from the situation out here in the provinces. The “Hunger Games” movie does not look as fictional as it should. Even the official statistics show it.

In Calaveras County from 2008-’12, the median household income was $54,686, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. During the same period in Washington, D.C., it was $64,267. And that was true, despite the fact that D.C. had almost twice the poverty rate that Calaveras County did.

The thing that’s eating at me right now is much closer to home.

I looked at compensation figures for Calaveras County government employees. Such information is posted online by both the California State Controller’s Office and by Transparent-california.com – a project of the California Policy Center.

I have to confess that I was shocked and angered by what I found. It turned out that pay for Calaveras County employees, especially the top employees, rose dramatically from 2011 to 2013, while the rest of us saw our wealth wither.

It happens that 19 of the top 20 highest-compensated Cala-veras County employees work-ed for the county in both years, making it possible to see what happened to those individuals.

A few cautions about the figures: The State Controller and Transparentcalifornia.com both list something called “regular pay.” That regular pay is more than the county’s hourly base pay.

Calaveras County Auditor-Controller Rebecca Callen said that regular pay also includes other forms of pay such as longevity increases, education incentives and even uniform allowances.

Also, some individual Cala-veras County law enforcement employees in 2013 worked a lot of overtime due to several horrific cases. Thus, their total compensation was far higher than it would be in a year without such high-profile crime.

Anyway, the 19 Calaveras County employees I looked at in 2013 had regular pay that ranged from $233,104, in the case of psychiatrist Robert Mulert, the top-compensated employee, to $81,197 for Sheriff’s Sgt. Rachelle Whiting, who was the bottom of the top-20 list based on regular pay, but who rose several spots based on total compensation that in-cludes overtime and benefits.

I excluded Chief Probation Officer Stephen Siegel from the analysis. He was number 16 on the list based on total compensation in 2013, but was not working in that job in 2011, making comparison impossible. He had regular pay of $102,256.

Looked at as a whole, the 19-member group in question saw its regular pay rise 43 percent in this period, while total compensation rose 39.4 percent. In 2013, the average total compensation for members of this group was $186,041, up an average of $52,565 from two years earlier.

Let’s put this in context.

During this same period, the assessed value of the property tax roll dropped 4 percent or 5 percent every year, according to Assessor Leslie Davis.

Calaveras County residents receiving social security saw small increases in 2011 and 2012, for a net increase of about 5.4 percent in the period. People paid to provide care through the state’s In-Home Supportive Services program saw no increase.

As for me, my pay was stagnant in the period, because I am in an industry that is shrinking along with the larger economy. Am I an idiot who deserves to stagnate because I lack what it takes to make it into the governmental elite? Do all of us sinking into poverty deserve our fate?

I don’t like to write from a place of anger. I like the well-paid county employees on the list I analyzed. But the growing rift between those who still have local government salaries and the rest of us is a very bad sign.

Another admission: I’m saying this even though part of the reason I can afford to work in a low-paid field like journalism is that I am married to a woman who has a well-compensated job with San Joaquin County.

If we are to succeed as a community, we need to hang together. And by “succeed,” I mean being able to pass on values and a decent quality of life to future generations. Having a small elite raise its income by 30 percent, 40 percent or 50 percent while the rest of us wilt is not hanging together.

Somehow, we need to regain the sense that those of us who are governed and those who govern share a common destiny.

Contact Dana M. Nichols at dana@calaverasenterprise.com or call 498-2052.