Friday, July 23, 2010

Top County Pensioners Include The Disgraced And The Fired. More California Corruption..Will It Ever End?

The good news: The Watchdog has got the Orange County Employees Retirement System database of pensioners collecting $100,000 or more annually.

But there’s a caveat: As the Orange County Register told the court, we will use the information for research and analysis and not just post the raw data.
So stay tuned, we are furiously crunching the data and getting it into shape for a meaningful searchable database.

Meanwhile, here’s a couple of tidbits, to whet your appetites:


Robert Citron, the disgraced treasurer whose risky investments led Orange County into the largest municipal bankruptcy of its time, is collecting around $148, 327 a year.  That’s an increase of more than 50 percent above the $92,904 a year pension that he made when he retired in 1994 – thanks to cost of living raises.

Citron, now 85, earned $104,354 a year in salary when he left office and pleaded guilty to six felonies. He had hidden his risky investments by diverting $89 million of  hard-to-explain interest away from schools and other agencies, and into county coffers.


Another notable retiree is former sheriff Michael S. Carona, who left in 2008 after being indicted on felony corruption charges.

Carona is receiving about $217,457 a year and is number seven on the list of county retirees earning $100,000 or more annually. Yet he couldn’t afford to pay his own legal fees, and received free representation. Convicted on one federal charge of witness tampering, he is out on appeal.

The fourth highest  paid pensioner in the county is former Orange County Sanitation District general manager Blake Anderson, who was forced to resign in 2005 after hiring a leadership guru at $180,000 to help the sewer agency find its corporate soul. Dharma Consulting was hired by Anderson on a no-bid contract at $15,000 a month. Anderson, who was criticized in a later audit for exceeding his authority, now lives on about $228,025 a year.

Article by Tony Saavedra, Orange County Register

           

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