Week in Review : MAJOR EVENTS, IMAGES AND PEOPLE IN ORANGE COUNTY NEWS : MISCELLANY / NEWSMAKERS AND MILESTONES

“I will accept whatever check they send me because I earned it. I gave them more than they paid for. They got more that a bargain,” was how former Santa Ana City Manager Robert C. Bobb said he felt about a City Council decision to give him $2,100 as a retroactive pay raise.

Bobb, who is black, said part of the reason he decided to accept a $110,000-a-year position as city manager in Richmond, Va., after working 2 1/2 years in Santa Ana was that the council had not granted him a pay raise since September, 1984, although every other city employee got a salary increase in early 1986.

Bobb also said he agreed with Councilman John Acosta that pay raises at City Hall are often racially biased.

As an example of such discrimination, he pointed out the fact that he was making $84,000 a year when he resigned to go to Virigina, while his successor, David Ream, a former community redevelopment director with no experience as a city manager, will be paid $98,500.

Vice Mayor P. Lee Johnson, who was one of two council members voting against Bobb’s raise, said, “I think it smacks of being a gift of public funds.”

Bobb said he considered that characterization and the large pay increase for Ream “a slap in the face.”