How the Road to Bell Was Paved

[Valin]

City Journal:

William Voegeli
Autumn 2010

Before this summer, even many Southern Californians had never heard of Bell, a modest Los Angeles suburb of 37,000 located near enough to the big city for views of the downtown skyscrapers. Then the Los Angeles Times ran a front-page story revealing that Bell’s city manager, Robert Rizzo, was receiving a salary of $787,637, while the police chief got $457,000 a year and the assistant city manager made $376,288.

Overnight, Bell became America’s most famous kleptocracy, featured in national publications and on network news programs. The quick resignations of the three hypercompensated civil servants failed to kill the story. Further efforts by Times reporters uncovered extravagant pay packages for other city employees, outlandish fringe benefits, and loans of public funds to city workers and favored businesses. The state attorney general filed a lawsuit against Rizzo and other Bell officials, while the Los Angeles County district attorney indicted him, the assistant city manager, and six current or former city council members on corruption charges. If none of those legal actions succeeds, taxpayers throughout California can expect to fund a pension for Rizzo worth $600,000 per year, according to the Times’s calculations, while the retired police chief makes ends meet on a pension of $411,000.

Bell’s all-you-can-eat personnel policies are outrageous but not surprising. The abuse of power, after all, is an endemic political problem, one so old that it’s often rendered in Juvenal’s Latin: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who will guard the guardians themselves?

(Snip)