During the past two weeks, members of ICMA, Cal-ICMA, and the City Managers Department of the League of California Cities have responded to the controversy concerning the excessively high salaries reported for the city manager, assistant city manager, and police chief of Bell, California (pop. 38,000).
The controversy began on July 15, 2010, when the Los Angeles Times published an article titled “Is a city manager worth $800,000?” The story generated considerable interest among the media, since the city of Bell is described as “one of the poorest cities in Los Angeles County” and, yet, was paying salaries to three of its top managers that significantly exceeded comparables in the local and national market. The L.A. Times story also focused on the $100,000 annual salaries of four of the five part-time council members.
In response to that article, retired California City Managers Kevin O’Rourke (co-chair, Cal-ICMA Committee on the Profession) and Dave Mora (ICMA West Coast regional director) submitted a letter to the editor of the L.A. Times that first appeared on PublicCEO.com on July 22 and was attributed to ICMA. The Times ultimately published the letter from Dave and Kevin as an opinion piece on July 25.
The Bell salary story went viral the week of July 19, with Bloomberg News, Reuters News Service, the Associated Press, and other major news outlets reporting on it. The media coverage peaked with a four-minute segment produced by Katie Couric, “Salary Backlash in Small-Town California,” which aired on the CBS Nightly News on July 21. A similar story was featured on the July 27 NBC Nightly News in its “Fleecing of America” segment.
The Southeast Los Angeles County City Managers Group responded on July 20 with a letter titled “Fellow City Managers Respond to Bell's Salaries Outrage.”
On July 23, ICMA widely disseminated a press release/statement to major national media (including those that had covered the Bell salary story) and local government reporters and posted the text as an article on the ICMA website the same day. The release/statement emphasized the importance of ensuring that the process used to determine a manager’s salary be “fair, reasonable, transparent, and based on comparable public salaries nationally and regionally.” The League of California Cities also issued a statement condemning the excess compensation provided by the city of Bell. West Coast Regional Vice President Karen Pinkos (ACM, El Cerrito, Calif.) reported that she used the ICMA and league statements to respond to a number of e-mails and telephone calls regarding the situation and had tweeted links to the information.
In two letters dated July 30, 2010, Cal-ICMA and the League of California Cities offered to assist the offices of the L.A. County District Attorney and the California Attorney General in their investigation launched in response to the Bell situation.
ICMA, Cal-ICMA, and the League of California Cities continue to field inquiries concerning the Bell salary controversy. ICMA is currently working with a reporter at the Wall Street Journal to develop a story underscoring the fact that the cited example is unique and that in most cases, local government CAOs and other managers are under-, rather than overpaid, particularly in comparison with their private sector counterparts. If a story materializes, it will be posted on icma.org.