Supervisors Doing OK on Pay

I applaud Orange County Supervisor Jim Silva’s desire to “depoliticize” the supervisors’ obscene compensation package (“Silva Raises a New Approach to Pay Scale,” Jan. 30).

Each member is compensated well into six figures. Silva’s suggestion is to tie the members’ pay to the salaries of a state official, perhaps a judge. Supervisors’ salaries would then rise or fall with that of the official, whose compensation is set by the state Legislature.

This would be a great way to halt all of the backdoor stipends and perks they have been getting. I would go one step further by suggesting we have only one source of compensation offered to them (to spend as they see fit). That would be a direct apportionment of the financial recovery from the bankruptcy and general performance of county employees and their services as perceived by the taxpaying “customers.”

The supervisors need to regain public confidence anyway, so they could do themselves a tremendous service by taking this quantum leap of nobility. It may be novel to some, but others believe the “customer is always right.”

Silva also said some supervisors have had part-time jobs to supplement their income, and that he feels their supervisor job should be full time. I tend to agree. And if anyone has a tough time managing to make ends meet on a basic annual salary alone of $82,100, I certainly wouldn’t want them running Orange County.

JAMES H. BRIDGES

Costa Mesa

* Two articles on raises for Orange County’s supervisors in the Jan. 30 Times deserve comment.

One was Supervisor Jim Silva’s proposed approach to tying their pay scales to those existing for other public servants. He proposes this to “depoliticize the issue and eliminate extra stipends and perks.”

That seems reasonable to me for establishing pay scales; but let’s tie actual pay to performance. Pay, for most of us in industry, is geared to performance; that is how it should be in politics, also. However, we should not have to wait to do “performance evaluations” at the polls because conditions can sour badly before voters react sensibly.

The second item deserving comment was the bar graph of supervisors’ salaries. That graph showed $45,600 in 1985 to $82,100 in 1990. The article lamented that the supervisors had not received a raise since 1990. To analyze that, I grabbed my calculator and crunched a few numbers. I assumed that the $82,100 will be the salary in effect through 1997. My results showed that from 1985 through 1997 the supervisors’ pay, compounded annually, will have advanced at a rate of 5.02%. In the world that I worked in, that was not a bad rate of improvement, even for outstanding performance!

M.H. BESTER

Huntington Beach

* What ingratitude! Here we are, the only county in the area driven into bankruptcy by the incompetence and inattention of our elected officials, and we don’t even pay them as well as Los Angeles County, which does not have such a distinction.

BELA A. LENGYEL

Irvine