YOU really hate to kick a troubled local city when it’s down. But then it’s not ourselves, or its residents, who are laying into Montebello City Hall, which is trying to recover from financial scandal and years of mismanagement.
It’s the Montebello City Council itself that is adding insult to injury.
The latest fiscal body blows to the people of the San Gabriel Valley city of 62,000 are chump change when compared with the missing millions and mysterious, uncharted municipal bank accounts of recent years.
But every little bit helps when you’re in fiscal recovery. And symbolism is important when you’re on a budget. If your family was trying to restore its own financial stability after going on a massive credit-card binge, it wouldn’t matter all that much in the grand scheme if you suddenly charged a pair of $350 snakeskin boots on the Visa just for old times’ sake.
It also would be a move unlikely to be met by the spouse with an aw-shucks grin.
So, when Montebello recently added a $14,000-a-month interim assistant city administrator to its payroll to go along with interim City Administrator Larry Kosmont’s $25,000-a-month salary, well – it doesn’t pass the smell test.
Keith Breskin’s work formerly came as part of the contract with Kosmont Cos., the city administrator’s private consulting firm.
Now it’s an add-on to the tune of $168,000 a year.
Kosmont – who to all appearances is a very competent financial administrator, which is precisely what Montebello needs – says his firm had been losing money on the previous deal, so that he needed to get the council to hire his employee Breskin separately as an independent contractor.
There are a lot of ways to add up a Profit & Loss statement. But, really, now – if Breskin’s salary was completely out of the original agreement, and is completely within the new one, then either the City Council was untruthful about the amount of work it was requiring from the consultants while it gears up to hire a permanent city manager, or Kosmont’s firm was not very good at estimating the scope of work itself. It’s one or the other.
Local city council members have complained to us that right now is a tough time to hire a good city manager – that a lot of turnover in the field has caused too little supply for the demand.
Perhaps that’s so. If it is, college students, may we suggest public administration as an extremely lucrative career path?
“It’s absolutely insane,” the council’s lone dissenting vote, Christina Cortez, said of the deal. “It’s insane money we put out for the same information in a different package with a nice little bow on it. Don’t get me wrong. He’s not a bad city administrator, but we can’t afford it. Everybody wants a Ferrari, but we can’t afford one. We need to go out and buy a Volkswagen.”
The sagest political commentary of the week.
Via: sgvtribune
