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People harp on about the MTA being a cesspool of patronage appointments with a bloated budget haven't seen anything. The Port Authority puts MTA in shade far as those things go, and has found ways to yet again bloat their budget with $150 million increase in compensation/overtime.
The problem is that you think $150 million is a lot of money, and "streetsblog" knows how to reel 'em in with numbers that look big to the average Joe.
For real, I think the most accurate remark is in this comment on the article:
Larry Littlefield • 10 hours ago • edited
If you are talking about people being overpaid compared with other places, you are really talking about PATH and the Port Authority police.
For anything else the average salary is high because there are no workers, only contract managers and executives. Practically every who works at the airports and seaport works for a private sector company, operating the facilities on behalf of the Port Authority. Comparative employment here, from the employment phase of the Census of Governments.
He's right. For example, look at the annual salary of the head of the Aviation Department. $279,214.00.
Peanuts compared to the private sector equivalent for someone who is responsible for five airports, two of them major international gateways. He or she (because there has a been a she) is on call 24/7/365, holidays, vacations, whenever.
Is that a patronage job? Of course not. The Director of Aviation job never has been, because nobody in their right mind would take that job for that low of a salary. Oh, every so often they've tried to go outside, spend big money on executive searches, and come up empty, and in the end the job goes to the person who is usually already doing it in an "acting" capacity. That person, like the one in the position now as you can see from his start date, is someone who has been with the Port Authority probably since they got out of college thirty-five years ago, not someone put there by a current politician. They'll take the pay because they're in the NYS retirement system, and also, they know that if they want to move to the private sector upon retirement, they can just sit home and someone will call and ask them to join their firm.
Oh, yeah, the patronage jobs exist, but the great majority of the 7000 employees are not on the radar of the governors. They just keep the place running, happy to get a living wage, decent benefits (much less decent than once upon a time, of course) and be in one of the industries that still has a pension plan.
And of course the most powerful, openly political positions are unpaid--the Board of Commissioners.
Governors and elected officals of NJ and NY are crying to DT and Congress they need bailout money by boatloads, yet no one is or has touched huge amounts of waste, fraud and abuse.
Governors and elected officals of NJ and NY are crying to DT and Congress they need bailout money by boatloads, yet no one is or has touched huge amounts of waste, fraud and abuse.
As I've already said, no politician is EVER going to touch the cops for the obvious reason that there are no politicians who have nothing to hide, and so they aren't going to clamp down on the people who have access to every type of surveillance that exists.
Other salaries are not widely out of line. Yes, there are always a number of "patronage" jobs where some useless idiot is parked because they can't do much of anything anywhere else, but they are greatly in the minority.
If you know of other specific abuses and fraud, you should report them to the Inspector General.
I'm not saying this in any way to say that this colors what you're saying, but I am curious--do you work for the Port Authority?
Not now. But I was there long enough that I know that the perception that everyone there is a political plant who does nothing all day and that contracts are handed out left and right to politicians' friends is a crock. So sure, it colors what I am saying. I'm trying to balance the wild-eyed screeching with some factual information.
Like most public perceptions held by people who really have no idea of what goes on in whatever organization they are focusing on, they were born of grains of truth. It's a political organization; ergo, decisions are always made that favor the politicians who hold the power and control. And that affects no one more than the rank and file of 7000 employees who are just there doing their jobs to keep a major transportation network going while working around the nonsense.
People harp on about the MTA being a cesspool of patronage appointments with a bloated budget haven't seen anything. The Port Authority puts MTA in shade far as those things go, and has found ways to yet again bloat their budget with $150 million increase in compensation/overtime.
Like it or hate it the following is only my opinion:
At least when we worked .........................you saw results....................
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<--- PA
