Overpaid City-County Employees Driving Need For Higher Taxes

Fellow blogger Pat Andrews has compiled a list of city-county employees earning more than $100,000 a year. The list is staggering, particularly within the Department of Public Safety, which is loaded down with high-paid pencil pushers sitting behind a desk. There are individuals with higher ranks and virtually no management responsibilities pulling down outrageous salaries. There are now 79 city employees earning more than $100,000 a year, the bulk of whom are within the Department of Public Safety. Public Safety Director Troy Riggs comes in with the highest salary of any city employee, earning just shy of $139,000 a year. A DWI sergeant, Michael Duke, is being paid an outrageous salary of $130,000 a year. He apparently gets bonus for higher volumes of drunk driving arrests. Bart McAtee is getting paid over $118,000 a year to serve as a lieutenant in charge of traffic enforcement. There's a Steve Graham with the title of private first class earning over $103,000 a year. The county has 31 employees earning more than $100,000. Marion Co. Prosecutor Terry Curry tops out the list with a salary over a little over $140,000. Sheriff John Layton is getting paid over $135,000 a year while our clerk of courts, Beth White, earns $80,500 a year.

There are the double dippers that really stick in your crawl. Vernon Brown, who just stepped down as a city-county councilor, earns nearly $100,000 a year as a battalion chief in the fire department on top of the approximately $15,000 a year he pulled down as a member of the council. Brown is a candidate for Warren Township Trustee this year, a job that pays $47,520 a year. Reliable sources say Brown plans to continue working both as a full-time battalion chief and township trustee if he is elected, allowing him to earn over $160,000 a year from two government paychecks. City-County Councilor Mary Moriarty-Adams earns over $70,000 a year from her make-work job in the county assessor's office in addition to the $16,000 she earned as a councilor, providing a combined $86,000 from two government jobs. Her husband, who draws a pension as a retired police officer, is also drawing a big paycheck for a make-work job in the sheriff's department. Councilor Steve Talley gets about $37,000 a year for a make-work civilian job at IMPD, in addition to the approximately $15,000 a year he makes as a city councilor. Like Brown, Talley is running for a township trustee's job in Lawrence Township this year. That job pays $40,000 a year. A new state law prohibits elected council members like Brown, Adams and Talley from serving as city-county council members and working for either the county or the city at the same time.

Chew on some of these figures while these SOBs prepare to raise your taxes again for public safety. In the words of then-candidate Greg Ballard in 2007, there's a lot of fluff in that budget. Folks complaining about the lack of police officers should start by eliminating at least 50% of the dead weight they have in glorified desk jobs paying big six-figure salaries with take-home car privileges.