Former Bell city administrator Robert Rizzo still gets more than he deserves, but this is much better.
“Invincible” act of the month:
Interim city administrators of Bell, California, who could not provide documentation setting the exorbitant salaries for which the city has become famous because, as Bell’s interim chief administrative officer Pedro Carrillo said, it “simply does not exist.” As a result, eligible salaries for purposes of calculating pensions will drop to those provided for by the city council long before the escalation in salaries. Former city administrator Robert Rizzo will be entitled to retirement benefits based on a salary of $85,200, about one-tenth of his last yearly pay, which results in an expected yearly pension of about $70,000 rather than the $600,000 he was expecting. His former assistant, Angela Spaccia, who made more than $375,000 a year, will not be eligible for pension benefits on any of her Bell income, while ex-Police Chief Randy Adams, who made $457,000 in his last year with Bell will instead have a pension based on about $85,000. Bell City Council members who were paid $100,000 yearly will see eligible salaries shrink to about $8,000. It’s possible the new administrator made documentation approving salaries disappear; on the other hand, since that would be a crime, perhaps the documentation, as he implied, never existed. As discussed in the August 2010 TAR, the odds of pervasive addiction among Bell officials is high, which gives credence to the idea that those officials felt so invincible they never bothered with such trivial formalities as actual minutes establishing or increasing salaries.