The Rio Grande Foundation has been using a new state law to request and post payroll information for city and county governments statewide (we are working on school districts). Despite having posted payroll information for Farmington and several other major cities statewide back in August, the effort has only started to make waves over the last few days. Check stories here and here.
The good news is that political leaders in the City of Farmington are planning to take the initiative by posting this (and perhaps other) information online in a further effort to improve transparency. So, kudos to those in the City who are attempting to give taxpayers a better idea of how their money is being spent!
I am not very happy about your quest for transparency! I can understand this if there were problems in local government, but just because some of the so called higher ups at the State and Federal levels are not worth anything at all, you have decided that all employees of governments have to be blasted all over the internet. My husband was a local government employee before he retired, are you now going to go after the retirees and have their incomes, which they have paid into for 25, 30, 40 years posted also. Farmington City governemnt had a system in place that anyone could access by just asking. I feel that having it posted on the internet for any wacko too see is not right! In my opinion you have just violated the personal rights of everyone who has been listed and posted. No one was trying to hide anything, it could be accessed as an open record request, but having the income along with names, and occupations of all these people was needless. Do you realize that you may have put the lives of police officers and their families in jeopardy by requesting this information be posted? Some of them may be working undercover and if the bad guys want to know anything about them, they can see it now. And thanks to the Farmington Daily Times, it is all ready posted as of Thursday night on their website. This is just another way for keeping tabs on people who are just going to work everyday and doing a job. I don’t suppose that any one at the Rio Grande Foundation would like for me to request transparency where you are concerned. Who is part of your organization, where they work, how much money you get paid through the Foundation and from an everyday job if you even have one. I would also like to know how much money to the foundation comes in from government grants. Lets see all of this on the world wide web. I am a tax payer and I DO NOT CARE what my neighbor is making per hour as long as he is actually going to work and doing a job and not living on my tax dollars for doing NOTHING.So now I would also like to see all those who are on Welfare of any kind and see those who have gone to the Unemployment Office to draw their unemployemnt checks. Those are all governemnt entities. I just do not understand why transparency in peoples paychecks is necessary for tax payers when we have so many living on our dimes that are not even trying to carry part of the load. Give me the names of those people and I would have no problem with it being advertised. But no, that is an unacceptable idea because it might embarass them. Well, how about the fact that now those people working at Parks & Rec or the Police Department or any other department, now know what all the other employees are making, will that not possibly cause dissention due to payroll differences? I am very,very disappointed in the Rio Grande Foundation at this time. I started receiving your emails sometime ago and found some of your items interesting. Now I am requesting that you remove me from your mailing list. I can no longer consider you a viable form of information as I have found other items that I have disagreed with. Oh, yes, I have 2 family members who are city employees in 2 different departments.They both put their lives on the line on a daily basis. They do not handle money and have no power to buy anything on the taxpayers dime and they make a fair salary, but not near enough for what they sometimes have to do that could leave their families without them.I am waiting for the first one to comment on an issue with someone else saying “You make more than I do and I want more money!” You know it is going to happen. GRRR!! I have got to stop writing as the more I think about this the angerier I get.
Judy you are looking at this as a glass half empty rather than a glass half full.
Look at the pay difference between the bottom of the scale and the top and ask yourself if you could live on $7-/hour.
Also, ask yourself if some of these elected officials deserve the money that we pay them.
If you ignore these issues and just vote for your friends, then you deserve the ulcer that you are giving yourself.
Wake up and smell your burning coffee!!!!!!!!!
Ijust read, again, your statement that you receive no government funding, so lets see a list of your donors and what they have donated.
I used to work at IBM back in the 1970’s. IBM has a policy of employees not talking about compensation. PERIOD. Gets you fired. Back in about ’72, Portugal passed a law that required all companies to post the same type salary information on their collective bulletin boards. It caused a real stir. Employees found out just how much money their desk neighbors were pulling down. The other subject that was illuminated was the “salary plan” overall. Most of the employees were making exactly the same after about 5 years of employment, had nothing to do with productivity. Now that did cause considerable dissension. To further put some light on this, when interviewing for a job, a former IBM manager asked me when I got my last raise and how much it was. He then proceeded to quote me my exact salary before I quit IBM. VERY PREDICTABLE. Maybe we are going to find out that when you are employed in the public sector, your compensation may become the topic of conversation in the neighborhood. In some cases it probably should, in others, maybe not. You could go to work for private enterprise and be compensated according to ability, something that occasionally even occurs in the public sector.
I believe that quite a few people in San Juan County are paid way too much, and others WAY TO LITTLE, when compared to other counties.
This information is necessary to determine how to vote in city and county elections.
(Judy I did not see a retiree payscale) Posting payscales and expenditures have been around for a while and Farmington is WAY behind being honest. City leaders are spending too much on legal issues instead of removing employees who cause the problems.