He’s angry, yes, and willing to expound at length on the many screwups and shortcomings of L.A.’s elected elite, but Douglas Epperhart isn’t out to fire anybody. He just wants to make some serious pay cuts.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s tops-in-the-nation (roughly) $232,000 annual mayoral salary? Slash it in half, Epperhart says.
The whopping $178,789 in wages drawn by each of L.A.’s 15 City Council members, making them far and away the most exorbitantly paid local elected officials in America? Chop those in half too, Epperhart says.
Ditto for City Attorney Carmen Trutanich (about $213,000) and Controller Wendy Greuel (some $195,000), who benefit from the same whacked-out “reformed” salary formula. Let them get by on something closer to a hundred grand, he declares.
“Anybody who turns on [televised City Council meetings] and watches ... will say, ‘These are the people who are running our government? And that’s what we pay them?’ ” asks an incredulous Epperhart, a likely future City Council 15th District candidate in San Pedro, who enjoys showing off a typed-up list of egregious examples of City Hall bungling.
His bullet points range from the L.A. City Council allowing thousands of illegal billboards to its approval of massive overdevelopment on an already jam-packed landscape. A particularly woeful example: shelling out almost $50 million for a custom enclosure for Billy the Elephant at the L.A. Zoo. (“The answer is, sell the elephant!” says the boyish-looking 53-year-old activist. “Get rid of it!”)
What separates Epperhart, a genial printer and publisher, from multitudes of fed-up Angelenos is that he is taking action. Spurred largely, he says, by an L.A. Weekly exposé of council salaries and perks published on February 26 (“Los Angeles on $300,000 a Year”), Epperhart and others in the city’s 88 Neighborhood Council groups are embarking on what some might call a quixotic attempt to force a pay cut on L.A.’s elected officials. They hope to put the issue to voters on the November 2010 ballot.
The city’s constitution currently links the salaries of elected leaders to raises the Legislature grants to Superior Court judges. Without even having to do a good job, a council member automatically receives a raise whenever judges do; Villaraigosa receives the judges’ pay — plus 30 percent.
As the Weekly reported, the unexpected result of this 1990s-era “reform” is that “L.A. City Council salaries are not just overinflated in an era of belt-tightening. They are ... higher than those of federal judges. They amount to a staggering 400 percent of L.A.’s median household income of $46,000 — and no other city council, in cities poor or rich, comes even close to that troubling disparity between public servant and the public.”
Epperhart’s plan is to insert the word “half” into the formula — four potent letters that would slash the City Council’s and three other elected officials’ pay by 50 percent and save L.A. taxpayers close to $2 million a year. “The longer they’re in office, the farther they get from you,” he says.
That’s because of the wealth vividly described in the Weekly’s story, he says — including eight free cars apiece (yes, eight cars), a $100,000 slush fund each, and 17 to 25 personal staffers apiece, which, added together, rivals the size of the White House office staff.
Numerous phone calls from the Weekly yielded very few City Council members willing to comment on the plan, as if they hoped the awful thing would wither and die on its own. Nor did Villaraigosa’s office respond.
As Epperhart tells it, Councilwoman Janice Hahn chided him, “Oh, you’re going to cut my pay in half?” Epperhart says he promised to try, saying, “You’re not going to starve.”
Hahn’s office ducks the issue. “The councilwoman doesn’t really have a comment on this,” as one press aide puts it.
City Hall is treating Epperhart’s idea as a joke. “We’ve got to get them to that ‘oh, shit’ moment,” he says, conceding it won’t be easy. To qualify for the 2010 ballot, Epperhart’s bugeoning organization — right now technically titled the “Los Angeles Citizens Compensation Committee for Yes on Unknown Measure” — must collect valid signatures from 240,000 registered voters, which is a costly, very difficult.
Epperhart figures to accomplish it entirely via the Internet and through Neighborhood Council watchdog groups. But the decision to forego pricey, professional signature-gatherers is almost always the kiss of death for a ballot measure.
But Epperhart is counting on this being an extraordinary cause at an extraordinary time.
He jabs a finger at a flier that shows how L.A. City Council salaries, at $178,789, now outstrip even those of U.S. senators ($174,000), and leave New York City Council members in the dust ($112,500). It might, in fact, be the highest-paid city council in the world.
