This just in from longtime FR friend and conservative leader Mark Bucher… To put this in context, the City Council in Costa Mesa just announced pink slips and possible layoffs of around half of the city workforce due to a huge budget deficit. Last November the unions got a sweetheart four year extension of lucrative benefits before a change-over to a Council makeup that would likely have driven for significant reductions in employee pay and benefits… Here’s more info.
On March 22, City of Orange City Manager, John Sibley, sent a letter to all city employees discussing the suicide of Huy Pham, an employee of the nearby city of Costa Mesa, who had been given notice that he was going to be laid off in six months. Sibley starts by saying he cannot affix blame on the leadership of Costa Mesa, but then goes on to imply that the Costa Mesa City Council could have prevented Pham’s suicide if they had handled things differently, writing “I can, however, question the wisdom and manner of their actions and it is a reminder to all of us about the importance of treating people with dignity and respect.”
Sibley’s letter is a thinly veiled attempt to gain favor with the city employees in Orange by exploiting this tragedy. In so doing, he is following the lead of Nick Bernardino, the general manager of the Orange County Employees Association, who said shortly after Pham’s suicide “You cannot give out notices wholesale like that in this economy. That’s what’s going to happen.”
Later in Sibley’s letter, after acknowledging Orange’s dire finances he signals that he will obstruct attempts by the Orange City Council to reduce staff, saying “I will do everything I can to prevent the type of actions that gave rise to the traumatic situation that our colleagues in the City of Costa Mesa are dealing with.”
Ultimately, Sibley’s decision to cast aspersions on the City Council of Costa Mesa is not going to make his job any easier. When one includes the cost of benefits, the average firefighter in Costa Mesa makes $179,000 per year. Similarly, the average police officer in Costa Mesa makes $174,000 per year, and the average non-safety employee in Costa Mesa makes nearly $100K per year. And when CalPERS finally admits they can’t earn 7.75% per year on their pension fund investments, the cost of benefits for all of these employees is going to add, on average, another $20,000, or more, to their annual total compensation costs. To the extent council members in Costa Mesa were unable to negotiate reductions in pay and benefits, they had to lay people off. They had no alternative, and Sibley knows it.
Sibley’s comments are inappropriate for a city manager and affront to the citizens of Costa Mesa, as well his own City Council.
Mark Bucher is the President of the California Public Policy Center, and this post originally appeared on one of their websites, UnionWatch.