Thousands on L.A.'s payroll earning more than $100,000

Our new blog Overpaid Government Worker reports this from the L.A. Daily News:

As Los Angeles grapples with its largest budget deficit in history, lucrative compensation packages for thousands of city workers are driving much of the gap, and there's little end in sight.

In the past year alone, gross annual payroll costs have soared $120 million for nearly 48,000 city employees - $90 million of that going to 35,000 civilian and sworn workers - and bumped the total payroll up to $3.2 billion, or nearly half Los Angeles' $7 billion budget.

While city leaders seek to close a looming $406 million budget shortfall with everything from fee hikes to service cuts, a Daily News review of salary data shows more than 21,000 city workers take home $70,000 or more a year and more than 6,000 take home more than $100,000.

City workers' average salaries will reach about $68,850 for civilians and $93,800 for sworn police and fire by July - placing them in the upper ranks of comparable cities and far higher than private-sector workers.

And the escalating salaries have emerged as a crucial issue in the city's current financial crisis as the mayor and others have called for cutting nearly 800 positions and enforcing mandatory furloughs for city workers to try to trim the shortfall.

About 75 percent of the climb in payroll, or roughly $90million, is being charged to the general fund - the same amount the mayor has said he wants to raise in higher fees for everything from parking to golf.

"Nobody to my knowledge in the history of Los Angeles has ever actually cut their salary (versus passing up cost-of-living increases)," said David Fleming, former chairman of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce.

"The point is, pain has got to be shared. If we're expecting the taxpayers to endure some pain, then everybody should."