retirement system. that s one of the complaints many some of them have been using the system to their advantage. now, ed, you say they bounce around. but ultimately, didn t the mayor and city council of bell have to approve the salaries that were being given out? again, $800,000 for a city manager. $457,000 for the chief of police. $376,000 for the assistant city manager. yeah, and the frightening thing about that, apparently a lot of those salaries were legal. you had a vote in the city a couple of years ago which had a very low turnout, and in that vote, it authorized the city council to approve these just outrageous salaries that everybody was making, so the people of bell, many of them are not documented workers to begin with, let alone legal residents, so you had a low turnout at the polls, and the people approved this measure, and that s what gave apparently the city council carte blanche to start writing paychecks. and the city manager, robert
for you. for you to treat us this way. and if you don t know who is looking at this, everybody in the nation is looking at this city. and we should be embarrassed. we are looking at this city. to do that, we bring in ed mertz, with knx 1070 news radio. ed, good morning. good morning. i want to figure out how this happened here. a town of 38,000 people, ten miles from downtown los angeles. in which about a quarter of the people there, it s a largely latino population, live underneath the poverty level. are you kidding me? and you have people in this town making this kind of money? how did this happen? almost $800,000 a year for the city manager? it s kind of a complicated formula that these people use. many of them bounce around from communities and boards, and accrue experience and years on the job and they apply that toward the calpers state
r rizzo, city manager for 17 years, he has resigned. but that doesn t seem all that painful given that he is getting a $600,000 pension. can anything be done about that? apparently nobody is going to be able to touch that estimated $600,000 a year retirement pay that he will get. it just seems at this point officials from the state and local levels are saying, you know what? we don t think we can do anything about that. what is the best thing that the attorney general, gubernatorial candidate jerry brown in that state, can to about this situation? even jerry brown isn t sure where this situation will lead. he is running for governor, but he will make all of the hay out of it he can. but at this point, with some tactics being legal, it s hard