Top Dog No More
Move over Sheriff Lee Baca. As of Jan. 20, 2001, you probably won’t be the highest-paid public official in America.
Baca, whose annual salary is $207,000, will likely drop to second place behind the next U.S. president now that Congress has approved a doubling of pay for that job from $200,000 to $400,000 a year.
President Clinton is expected to sign the bill, even though he won’t see a penny of the pay hike.
Baca actually had a shot at remaining king of the income heap. But he has deferred another $195,000 a year in retirement income that he could have collected after retiring last year as a chief in the Sheriff’s Department to run for the top job.
Steve Frates, a professor of government studies at the Rose Institute at Claremont McKenna College, said Baca’s salary shows just how handsomely top local officials in Southern California are paid.
“The real disconnect is down in the trenches, like the sheriff’s deputies,” Frates says. “It’s those people who should be getting the raises.”
Resale Value
Talk about a windfall for the U.S. government and a raw deal for Beverly Hills.
Back in 1932, the city sold a parcel of land at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Crescent Avenue across from Beverly Hills City Hall to the federal government to build a post office. The price was $1.
This year, the U.S. Post Office shut down its Civic Center facility and consolidated its operations to the newer Postal Annex on Maple Drive, leaving the historic building vacant.
City officials want to restore the old site.
“We tried to buy it back for $1,” Beverly Hills Mayor Tom Levyn told the recent Westside Urban Forum. “We eventually did buy it back for $3,999,999 more than we sold it.”
Number Please
On second thought, maybe you shouldn’t recycle your old Yellow Pages.
One of L.A.’s very first phone books recently commanded $1,600 when it was put up for auction by Butterfield & Butterfield.
It was among a batch of books handed out for free in the 1880s after the city granted the Los Angeles Telephone Co. the right to offer local service.
The book contains just 90 names and numbers and had simple dialing instructions “ring two bells to call central office and give telephone number.”
Big Niche
Call it the Hollywood side of Sears.
When the managers of Chicago’s Sears Tower the tallest building in the United States wanted to entertain visitors with a multimedia program, they chose Dellmont Leisure Design in La Crescenta for the job.
Dellmont got the project after finishing “Top of the World,” the exhibit on the 107th-floor observation deck of the World Trade Center in New York.
When that job was done, “we started contacting owners of other tall buildings” to minimize down time, said Dave Schweninger, chief executive of Dellmont.
Between work on tall buildings, Dellmont designs attractions for theme parks and museums. After all, Schweninger says, putting together exhibits for skyscrapers is “definitely a niche market.”
