Every now and then, a writer publishes an article that clarifies not only the cost, but also the benefit of that cost. In Shasta Lake, a man with a video camera and a YouTube account, takes aim at the city manager, Carol Martin, and her salary. In his calculations, she takes $20 per resident per year. As he states in his video, she is no different than the people who ran Bell.
His comparison, as the author of this article in the Redding Searchlight points out, between the city manager salaries of Redding and Shasta Lake, are flawed. In Redding, the city manager makes $2.83 per resident, but if that were a pay scale and it was applied to Shasta Lake, the city would be able to pay its city manager roughly $30,000. That certainly wouldn’t help attract or retain someone with a skill set to manage not only the city, but electric, sewer, and water utilities or a redevelopment agency.
From the Redding Searchlight:
What’s a city manager’s services worth to an individual resident? A dollar a year? Ten bucks? One hundred?
I have no idea what the right answer might be, but this video on the newly created ShastaLakeRecall YouTube channel (which, judging from the first post, seems to be against the recall of Councilwoman Dolores Lucero) asserts that Shasta Lake City Manager Carol Martin is grossly overpaid at “around $200,000” a year including salary and benefits.
“That means that every man woman and child in the City of Shasta Lake is paying her $20 a year.”
Read the full article here.