larger view

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t jealous.

My entire working life, I’ve only ever heard of pensions — kind of like how I’ve heard of unicorns.

And medical benefits? Sure I get ’em, but I, and my co-workers, pay an ever-increasing percentage to keep ’em (and we’re lucky for that, I might add).

So, although I know that Kern County department heads and managers work hard and have huge responsibilities, I almost spit Diet Pepsi through my nose when I saw how much taxpayers are kicking in for their benefits and perks.

We’re paying a little more than a third of their salaries — 33.48 percent — into retirement alone. (Based on a yearly actuarial review, that amount was bumped up from 30 percent a few weeks ago even as the Board of Supervisors was pressing for more painful cuts to public services. Sheesh!)

For Public Defender Mark Arnold, that works out to $73,200.63 a year of taxpayer money chucked into his “gone fishing” account.

For District Attorney Ed Jagels, it’s $69,152.49. New County Administrative Officer John Nilon gets $66,482.85; Resource Management Director David Price gets $56,225.28, and so on.

The county pays $13,044 a year per department head/manager for medical benefits.

That’s not a shocking number in itself, except when you learn they don’t pay a dime toward that tab.

I wonder how many Lotto tickets (retirement tickets as I call them) I could buy with what I have to contribute toward my medical premiums each year?

Things are different for new employees, thank goodness. Anyone, including department heads, hired after Oct. 23, 2007, must pay a portion of their medical and retirement costs for their entire county careers.

That’s a start, but considering the economy today, supervisors need to look much more closely at those in the upper pay strata.

Supervisors Michael Rubio and Ray Watson both told me they are ready to look at health and retirement costs, perhaps having existing employees pay more into those funds now, rather than wait for attrition to naturally reduce those costs.

That may seem harsh to some, but it’s what the private sector does when we get in a money pinch.

“It’s important to attract good, qualified people to these positions,” Environmental Health Services Director Matt Constantine ($111,557.35 base pay) told me about what he described as the county’s “generous but fair” pay and benefits.

He and others I spoke with reminded me that pay was increased a few years ago because the county lagged far behind other agencies and the private sector and not only couldn’t recruit good people, it was losing them to better-paying jobs.

That was then.

Now, the county is struggling and Constantine agreed it’s fair to re-evaluate. He noted that department heads and managers did not receive a pay increase scheduled for this month that was part of a three-year, 12 percent increase approved in 2007.

“Maybe in these tight times, other reductions should be made,” he said.

Such as, perhaps, the auto allowance — $7,296 per year.

Other than a few department heads/managers (Fire, Sheriff, Environmental Health maybe), I don’t see a great need for these folks to be driving around on county business.

Oh, and I found out when they DO drive on county business, they can charge mileage!

It’s a “reduced rate” of 15 cents per mile as opposed to 50 cents per mile, I was told.

To which I can only say, AAACCKK!

I’m pretty sure county business won’t grind to a halt if the CAO, auditor/controller, county counsel, employers training resource director and a host of others have to do without a car allowance.

But wait! Don’t answer yet, there’s more!

All department heads/managers get something called KernFlex pay —10 percent of their base salary.

KernFlex was started in the 1980s to make up for items not covered by employee benefits and was NOT used to calculate retirement costs. Time passed and a lawsuit made it clear that such extra pay, not uncommon in other counties, must be figured in to retirement pay.

So, every salary for a county department head or manager is really 10 percent higher than what appears on the surface.

I think that’s a little sneaky and, after talking to Kern Medical Center CEO Paul Hensler ($341,250.12 base salary, no KernFlex because he’s a contract employee), think it ultimately harms recruitment efforts.

Hensler, who acknowledges he makes a lot of money but said it’s about at the midpoint compared to similar positions in the state, said when he’s trying to hook new administrators, salaries look low here until he explains KernFlex.

“It puts us at a disadvantage. I don’t know why it continues.”

Agreed. Just roll it into their base pay so we all know who’s making what, or do away with it.

Kern could take a lesson from the new executive director for the Local Agency Formation Commission, or LAFCO, who was named just last week. This is kind of a hybrid agency, but it typically has followed county wages and benies.

No mas.

The new executive director, Rebecca Moore, who’s been with LAFCO since 1994, will earn $103,500, with no KernFlex. She’ll also be paying 20 percent toward her medical benefits and 8 percent into PERS. (She will get the car allowance).

 Her predecessor, Bill Turpin, enjoyed the full county ride.

“I’m very happy with my pay,” she told me. “Sure, I was a little disappointed not to get

KernFlex, but it’s fair. It’s the right thing to do in these times.”

Wow, she’s a keeper!

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her  column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/noholdsbarred, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com.

We may be one step closer to getting water back in the Kern River.

The State Water Resources Control board has set a hearing for Oct. 26-28 to hear testimony and sift through evidence about whether as much as 120,000 acre feet of river water is up for grabs after a water district was found to have forfeited it in 2007.

The city has argued that the water is out there for the taking and they want it to run down the river.

Imagine! A river in our river bed!

“This is the first stage of a two-stage process,” said Florn Core, Bakersfield’s water resources director.

This hearing will be very technical as the city and several water districts argue the fine legal points of whether unappropriated water is truly available.

Core said he feels the city has a strong case because during a 12-year-long legal battle over this very water, several lower courts found it was available, but the final decision had to be made by the Water Resources Control board.

At least four water districts and the city of Shafter have argued there is no unappropriated water. They’ve also said if the board finds there is some water up for grabs, they should have it for homes and businesses and irrigation.

I agree with the city that the river, and the citizens, should get that water for recreation, to restore the natural habitat surrounding the river bed and to replenish the aquifer.

I’ve encouraged people to write to the board in support of the city’s position. This upcoming phase is much more technical than simply saying “I want a river!”

But it still couldn’t hurt to send a note reminding the hearing officer that A) you want any unappropriated water back in the river and B) you’re watching this process closely.

If — big IF — the officer rules there is available water, then we’ll need a full frontal assault in support of getting that water back into the river. That’s still a ways down the road.

For now, keep your powder dry and cross your fingers.

SUPPORT THE RIVER!

If you’d like to send a comment in support of the city of Bakersfield’s petition and application write to:
State Water Resources Control Board
Division of Water Rights
RE: Kern River
1001 I Street, 14th Floor
P.O. Box 2000
Sacramento, CA 95812-2000
High points to hit:
State your support for Bakersfield’s position that there is unappropriated water in the Kern and that it should be run down the river to:
• Ensure Kern River water stays in Kern County.
• Protect and maintain the quality of our drinking water.
• Preserve river habitat.
• Enhance recreational opportunities.

Oh brother.

Those were my first thoughts when I read yet another study designed to scare the breath out of us, literally.

This time around, it’s air pollution making babies dumb in utero (that means before they’re born).

The study, of 249 poor kids in New York City linked exposure to air pollution before birth with lower IQ scores later in life, which researchers said bolstered evidence that bad air may harm the developing brain.

Words like “link,” “may,” “suggest,” “associated with” and “could” make me very nervous when used in frightening studies like this one that not only cause worry over the health of our children but could, might, may, probably will, be used to create even more restrictive regulations for benefits that are at best uncertain.

Basics from the study:

The moms wore air monitors for 48 hours during the last few months of pregnancy to gauge inner-city pollution exposure. Of the 249 kids studied, 140 were in the high exposure group.

At age 5, those kids scored lower than kids not in the high exposure group.

All the children lived in low-income neighborhoods and and fewer moms in the high exposure group had graduated from high school.

I haven’t read the study, just the article about it, which we dutifully ran on the front page as many news organizations did because A) it’s a study and B) it’s scary.

But since I started delving into these kinds of studies more deeply, I’ve learned to be a more skeptical.

I contacted Stanley Young, assistant director for bioinformatics at the National Institute of Statistical Sciences in North Carolina, and asked for his thoughts.

Turns out he had already asked the authors of this study for their data set to see if he could replicate their results. They declined. (This has been an ongoing issue with the authors of other studies “linking” PM2.5 exposure with an increased death rate, but that’s another rant.)

Without the data sets, Young and other scientists were left to read the study and ponder its findings with the rest of us.

Just a couple of points I pondered were that the kids came from low-income neighborhoods and at least some had uneducated parents, two factors long associated with academic underachievement. 

Young, who has a Ph.D in statistics and genetics, had more scientific ponderings. He noted the researchers did vast numbers of statistical comparisons and it doesn’t appear they adjusted their analysis to reflect the number of questions.

Asking loads and loads of questions means you increase your odds of getting a “hit” (something that is statistically significant) by chance alone.

“Statistically significant does not equal true,” Young explained. “But you will have to trust them as they will not give up their data set.”

He also noted that the lead author of the air-pollution-leads-to-dumb-kids study used at least some of the same children and others in previous research that linked (there’s that word again!) prenatal air pollution exposure with genetic abnormalities that could increase risks for cancer; smaller newborn head size; reduced birth weight; developmental delays at age three; and children’s asthma.

Whew!

Again, if you’re talking about low-income communities, factors such as diet, alcohol consumption, smoking and a host of others could be responsible for all those findings.

And I can’t help wondering, if you’re looking at the same set of kids and see developmental delays early on and then low IQ scores later, is it the air? Or the kids?

As Young points out, if you don’t let other scientists scratch around your data sets, we’ll never really know for sure.

Despite my skepticism, I’m not saying we shouldn’t do these kinds of experiments and studies, we should.

But the data should be open for inspection. In fact, considering the possible regulatory impacts on all our lives, if a dime of government money is used, it should be required by law .

Perhaps I have trust issues.

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her  column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/noholdsbarred, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com

Most of us are lucky enough that we aren’t caught in this no-win situation.

You desperately want to make your gang-riddled neighborhood safer, but talking to the police makes you and your family a target.

What do you do?

I’d like to say I’d go to the cops because first and foremost, crime victims deserve a voice and, of course, doing nothing only makes gangs stronger.

If I lived in a neighborhood plagued by gangs, however, the reality would be much more complex.

I might have known these “vicious” gang-bangers when they were children, their family might be friends or family to my own.  At the very least, they would know me, where I live, who my children are and where my friends live.
That makes me extremely vulnerable.

Which is why I can only encourage those living in areas where gang violence has exploded this year to come forward, even if only to give an anonymous tip.

But I can’t, and I won’t, judge them if they don’t.

That leaves the Bakersfield Police Department fighting a nearly impossible battle trying to solve 9 gang-related homicides, and far more shootings and assaults, that have occurred just this year.

Detectives are used to getting only scraps of information on gang killings, but for some reason, even that has dried up recently.

In an almost defeated tone, Lt. Hajir Nurridin noted that community outrage seems muted at best.

“These aren’t just numbers,” she said. “They’re real people.”

Indeed.

In January, husband and wife Curtis and Tina West, both 44, were walking home from the store in the early evening when someone walked up and blew them away.

On a soft spring night in April, 62-year-old Iva Lee Craig was killed and Mamie Foreman, 54, and Gregory Webb, 44, were shot by goons in a passing car as Craig closed the gate to her driveway.

A month later, a 30-week fetus was killed and the mother, Marisha Walker, 40, was shot multiple times, as was her husband, Anthony Walker, 49. Also shot were Anton and Heavenly Walker — both only six years old! — as they slept in their home.

In the early hours of July 5, a family reunion was shattered when thugs walking by a home indiscriminantly fired a semi-automatic handgun into the gathering, killing Anthony Johnson, 37, of Texas and wounding four others, only one of whom was from Bakersfield.

Earlier this year, I’d had hoped we might be making at least some progress on the gang front.

 On April 19, Deputy District Attorney Cindy Zimmer won the crown jewel of gang convictions against Country Boy Crip gang members Corey Ray Johnson, 23, Joseph Kevin Dixon, 25, and James Oliver Wallace, 21, who went on a murderous rampage for nearly a year in 2007, attacking and shooting numerous people in separate incidents.

Killed were 19-year-old Vanessa Alcala and her unborn child and 21-year-old James Oliver Wallace, Dixon’s own cousin.

Each defendant was sentenced to three life terms.

When I spoke with Zimmer about her stunning victory in a  case that could easily have ended in frustration as so many other gang cases have, she credited the DA’s ramped up gang enforcement efforts, tireless police work and most important, the witnesses who truly risked everything to testify.

Three of those witnesses are still in hiding. They had to move out of state, leaving everything behind, Zimmer said.

That those witnesses hung with Zimmer was incredible and not just because of threats to them. The whole trial operated under a cloud of intimidation. Audience members were kicked out more than once for picking fights and making threats in open court.

And one juror had to be excused after his wife was approached in the grocery store and told her husband had better vote “the right way.”

That is downright chilling.

But, like I said, we seemed to be making headway.

Shortly after Zimmer’s win, District Attorney Ed Jagels had a press conference on April 23 trumpeting the successes of his anti-gang program saying 85 percent of the 105 so-called “gang shot callers” were either in custody, dead, or on the run out of state.

Two days later, a 16-year-old girl walking with friends was shot in the leg by some coward in the backseat of a passing car. Two days after that, Craig was killed in her driveway and so on.

Sgt. Joe Aldana and I tossed reasons back and forth for the spike in gang killings and for the clampdown on information from witnesses. Could be distrust of the cops, could be fear, heck, it could even be a backlash to the increased enforcement efforts. Who knows?

The only thing we do know, and I’ve written whole columns on this before, is that no matter how hard Aldana and his colleagues work to solve these crimes, they’ll always be on the clean-up end of gang violence.

We cannot arrest our way to safe neighborhoods, as Sheriff Donny Youngblood has told me numerous times.

It’s up to us, the community, to do whatever it takes to keep kids from joining gangs in the first place.

But that’s a whole other rant.

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her  column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/noholdsbarred, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com

Government budgets are complicated, things were moving fast, it’s the worst financial crisis of our generation.

Yadda, yadda, yadda.

The county can make all the excuses in the world, but discovering we have $36 million in the bank rather than a $12 million deficit, as we’d been told over and over, isn’t exactly like finding a fiver in your jeans after you pull ’em out of the dryer.

Based on this little budget “oopsie” and others (oh yes, they have priors), it’s hard not to wonder who’s counting the chickens over there.

“There’s no question, and I said it long before we knew about the $36 million, that one of the biggest obstacles we face with potential layoffs and cutting services, is people thinking we’ve been here before,” Sheriff Donny Youngblood told me about how this “surprise” money affects department heads. “They feel like we’ve bluffed and we’ve bluffed and we’ve bluffed. I have a hard time convincing the staff that it’s real this time.

“And it is real.”

Even more so when you figure what the state might grab from counties in its tortuous efforts to close its own gap. Kern’s “found” money is likely to be swiped entirely and then some, forcing us to cut even deeper.

Until then, the Sheriff’s Department plans to:

• Lay off 15 civilians who manned the phone service desk. They took 7,500 reports last year. Deputies will now have to take over their duties.

• Lay off six of 12 evidence technicians who process crime scenes.

• Lay off 45 detentions deputies and move deputies into the main jail.

In the face of these kind of dire circumstances, Youngblood and others I spoke with were embarrassed by the mistake.

“It’s hard to convince the public we’re competent when this kind of thing happens,” Youngblood said.

“The public should be skeptical,” Supervisor Don Maben told me.

“It definitely raises a credibility issue, there’s no escaping that,” Supervisor Mike Maggard said.

“The heart of the issue is, these aren’t just numbers, it’s about credibility,” Supervisor Mike Rubio agreed.

While timing has put a brighter spotlight on this goof, it’s happened before.

In October 2007, the County Administrative Office found an extra $18 million between the county’s seat cushions. Most of that, $10 million, was unexpected revenue.

About $8 million, however, was leftover from the previous year’s budget, which makes me wonder, again: Did someone forget the batteries in their calculator?

We pay people good money — new CAO John Nilon earns $191,278.81 a year in salaryplus $93,973.77 in bennies and Auditor/Controller Ann Barnett pulls in $153,779.26 salary and $80,875.27 in benefits each year (holy cow!) —  to keep their eye on the county’s fiscal ball. This latest episode shows that, clearly, someone dropped that ball.

Everyone I talked with reminded me the $36 million was in the black rather than the red column.

Well, whoopee for us, but given what we know of this snafu so far — Barnett’s and Nilon’s offices apparently not sharing information — it could just as easily have gone the other way.

Supervisors reiterated on Tuesday their call for an investigation into what the heck happened, including a report on whether the county needs a more centralized budgeting system (each department currently uses its own budget methods and software).

Good.

Because despite Nilon’s comments that we can’t “live life looking in the rearview mirror,” you can’t fix what you don’t know is broken.

Opinions expressed in this column are those of Lois Henry, not The Bakersfield Californian. Her  column appears Wednesdays and Sundays. Comment at people.bakersfield.com/home/Blog/noholdsbarred, call her at 395-7373 or e-mail lhenry@bakersfield.com