Orange County Register investigative reporter Tony Saavedra has a great post today about plans afoot in Irvine to give its retired Orange County Great Park finance manager a no-bid contract for up to $198,400 to stay on next fiscal year.
That would be on top of the $133,882 yearly pension Kurt Mowery receives from the California Public Employees' Retirement System.
Wotta country!
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Saavedra writes (emphasis his):
Overall, Mowery would get $332,282 a year in retirement and pay–more than his total compensation of $209,761 during his last year as an Irvine employee. Mowery is one of the latest entries to the controversial world of
double-dipping–a practice that has increasingly come under fire as
generous government pensions encourage employees to retire earlier,
while continuing to work.
As the Great Park Board of Directors–which, as Saavedra put it, is essentially “the Irvine City Council plus four” (and whose major decisions the council must go back and approve anyway)–searches for a new financial chief, it will be Mowery's job to fill that roles, assist CEO Michael Ellzey and then help train the successor.
Speaking of Ellzey, he reportedly tells the Reg reporter no actual contract with Mowery has been negotiated and he just set the $198,400 figure there as a place-holder.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.