$260,004 to run Martinez?

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- Mr. Twa will have a five+ year employment contract that my be extended. His contract will include pay-for-performance provisions (+5/-5).

- Mr. Twa will receive benefits granted to management and elected department heads including auto allowance ($600), deferred comp, professional training dues and expenses. Additionally Mr. Twa will receive a vacation and sick leave plan allowance, relocation assistance ($20,000), and a housing allowance ($2,500) for six months to help with his relocation from Minnesota.

- Data courtesy ABAG and sfgate.com salary database

The BOS has been using salary only to compare public employee compensation with other governmental entities. Not only should the BOS have been using the full compensation package including salary and benefits, but they should also currently be comparing compensation with similar activities in the private sector as well. The call for comparing full compensation is not new, in fact, CoCoTax called for using the full compensation package in February of 2005.

What kind of time warp do the Supervisors live in, anyways?

This recommendation comes after several important labor negotiations. Hello? And why on earth would County government limit its salary comparisons only to other inflated public agency salaries and benefits instead of also looking at private sector compensation to produce better efficiency?

Sadly, we notice Supervisors, including Mary Piepho, are currently enamored with the overused buzz word “best practices.” Yet any MBA text-book management analysis would describe Contra Costa’s fiscal incompetence as mismanagement or fraud. The recommendation moans that it’s just so hard to track comparable salaries across public agencies because records are not readily available. Maybe because they too are incompetent and need better oversight and management instead of bending over for SEIU?

The BOS crows that this recent recommendation shows how Contra Costa is “leading the way among public agencies for calculating compensation costs.” This isn’t leading, this is half-measure and CYA.