Nice Work If You Can’t Get It
I didn’t get much sleep last night. I was at City Hall until midnight covering the last meeting of the City-County Council and didn’t get back until 1 a.m. Part of the problem was trying to figure out who to blame for the soon-to-be out of work Marion County Township Assessors walking out the door with $54,000 in their pockets and taxpayer-funded health insurance and benefits for the next two years.
When the Assessors were eliminated back in November, there was a question about what to do with their salaries. The law would not allow for the elimination of their pay, so the City-County Council had three options. First, it could continue paying them their current pay averaging $60,000 annually for doing nothing. They could pay them what they made in the early 1980s, which was based on the number of parcels of land in the township, and the Assessors still wouldn’t do any work. Or they could come up with some figure in-between, still the Assessors wouldn’t have to do any work. The CCC chose the latter and by a vote of 22-3, decided to pay each Assessor $27,000 a year for the next two years when their terms expire.
What’s annoying is that this was a bad situation from day one. No one should be paid for doing nothing. And while the CCC’s hands were tied, it could have at least tried to loosen the ropes a bit by lowering the Assessor’s pay as much as possible. And three of them tried to, but they were defeated by people who believed the Assessors were entitled to “severance” pay and recognition for their service, some of whom had 20 years.
I honestly can’t believe the taxpayers of Marion County are being forced to pay two years worth of salaries and benefits for people they fired this past November. I guess it is ironic in the sense that some former elected officials are being paid to do nothing, seeing you could argue that’s all some of them did to begin with and now their job duties have caught up with their pay.
