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State to Publish Salaries of Elected Officials & Employees of all California Cities and Counties Online
Just a day after L.A. City Controller Wendy Greuel announced that she will publish city salaries online, California State Controller John Chiang said he will be doing the same.
“The absence of transparency is a breeding ground for waste, fraud, and abuse of taxpayer dollars,” said Chiang, who was invited to the city of Bell to audit their finances after reported sky high salaries prompted controversy. “A single website with accessible information will make sure that excessive pay is no longer able to escape public scrutiny and accountability.”
Chiang has the authority under the government code to require local governments for salary information without authorization from the state legislature. To be published online by November, documents will include salary information for all elected officials and public employees, which will include top staff like city managers all the way down to city lifeguards.
How the information will be presented -- in a searchable database, listed in a series of PDF documents, etc -- is unknown, but Chiang wants to make salaries easy to find. "The point is to make it easily accessible," explained spokesperson Jacob Roper over the phone. "You dont't want to have to sift through several hundred papes of a documents to find it."
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