A satisfying moment in municipal government occurred Monday night when the city council of the small city of Bell, Calif., slashed its salaries by 90 percent and the mayor apologized to residents for outrageous salaries of city officials and promised to take no more salary himself.
What happened in the small, working-class Los Angeles suburb of Bell, where Spanish is often a first language and 17 percent of the 40,000 residents live in poverty, is a lesson in the power of the press and how the lack of a local, daily newspaper with strong reporting resources helps unethical and corrupt public officials to escape detection.
Bell, Calif., has no city newspaper. This lack of a local journalistic watchdog certainly contributed in part to the outrageous salaries many Bell officials were receiving. For example, most of the city council members were being paid close to $100,000 for part-time positions. The city's police chief, Randy Adams, was earning $457,000, considerably more than Los Angeles' police chief. Bell's chief administrative officer, Robert Rizzo, was earning $787,637 a year. When he started his job in 1993, Rizzo earned $72,000.
And Bell's assistant city manager, Angela Spaccia, was earning $376,288 a year.
These outrageous salaries, which are beyond greedy, given the working-class communities these "public servants" labored in, escaped detection until the Los Angeles Times submitted California Public Records Act request and did some investigative reporting.
It wasn't long before the outrage forced the resignations of the three overpaid officials mentioned in the previous paragraph and promises from the mayor and a city council member that they would not seek re-election.
Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times' investigation revealed that other Bell employees, including one making $9 an hour helping kids prepare for kindergarten, were laid off so Bell could "balance its budget."
The reckoning may not have ended for Bell's bureaucracy. Both county and state law enforcement agencies are planning investigations of how Bell's municipal government was run.
It's important to remember that the outrageous salaries and other injustices that occurred in Bell were not a secret. The information was out there. Bell needed a strong daily newspaper to make sure it was reported. It's lucky the nearby Los Angeles Times moved its attention and resources there briefly.
We wonder, though, how many other public officials are behaving outrageously without an adequate press to keep note?
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