EDITORIAL COUNTY CREDIBILITY CASH-STARVED COUNTY OFFICIALS CAN SAVE BIG BUCKS BY CURBING OVERTIME.LOS Angeles Los Angeles (lôs ăn`jələs, lŏs, ăn`jəlēz'), city (1990 pop. 3,485,398), seat of Los Angeles co., S Calif.; inc. 1850. County is perennially short on cash, or, at least, so say its elected officials. That's supposedly why they can't afford to keep county health clinics open, why county social services social services Noun, pl welfare services provided by local authorities or a state agency for people with particular social needs social services npl → servicios mpl sociales are inadequate and why Sheriff Lee Baca Leroy David Baca (b. May 27 1942, East Los Angeles, California) is the Sheriff of Los Angeles County, California. After graduating from Benjamin Franklin High School (Los Angeles) in 1960, Baca worked his way through East Los Angeles College before starting with the L.A. routinely releases inmates early from county jails. According to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. Baca and Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky Zev Yaroslavsky (born December 21, 1948) is a Los Angeles County politician. He served on the Los Angeles City Council from 1975 until 1994, when he was elected to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors. He was preceded in both offices by Edmund D. Edelman. , the county's fiscal situation is so bad that the supervisors should put a half-cent hike in the sales tax sales tax, levy on the sale of goods or services, generally calculated as a percentage of the selling price, and sometimes called a purchase tax. It is usually collected in the form of an extra charge by the retailer, who remits the tax to the government. on November's ballot. But for as much as county officials talk about the need for more and more money, they don't seem much interested in spending what they already have more wisely. A Daily News study of three of the five county departments that run up the highest overtime costs found that 1,395 employees netted more than $10,000 apiece in overtime pay. Some 390 employees boost their salaries more than 50 percent by working extra hours paid at time and a half. That's a sign of poor management in any organization, let alone one that claims to be short on cash. There are, to be sure, legitimate times and uses for overtime: sheriff's deputies working after hours at the scene of a crime or car crash, emergency-room nurses tending to a deluge of new patients, periodic spikes in the workload at any department - to name just a few. But there are, no doubt, plenty of illegitimate uses of overtime, too: employees stretching out or creating additional work so as to pad their paychecks, departments that should and could save money by hiring additional staffers. Generally, without some kind of abuse or mismanagement mis·man·age tr.v. mis·man·aged, mis·man·ag·ing, mis·man·ag·es To manage badly or carelessly. mis·man  age·ment n. , it's
not possible for businesses to rack up the kind of overtime hours for
which county taxpayers currently pay dearly. And if county leaders would
get serious about addressing the abuses and mismanagement, they would
have a lot more credibility when they plead poverty to the taxpayers.
For most L.A. residents, it's hard to sympathize with the plight of a county government that's more interested in protecting cherished inefficiencies than in spending the public's money effectively. Surely some of the county's number-crunchers can come up with a better way to manage employees, demand greater productivity and save money on payroll costs. And they shouldn't have to get paid overtime to do it. |
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