Cut from the same cloth

Sigh. This is beginning to get tiring. We have a school system and county leaders who not only won't work together for the greater good of the people (as in, those who pay their salaries), but seem to have a culture of greed, corruption and entitlement that knows no bounds.

From today's AJC:

Five employees in the DeKalb County CEO’s office and three county commissioners’ assistants got raises, despite other workers receiving a pay cut.

A joint investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Channel 2 Action News found 956 DeKalb employees got increases in pay last year, but the majority of them were from promotions.

Many of those increases also included new employees who got bumps in pay after completing a six-month probation period, records show.

“There is no across-the-board merit raise or cost of living adjustment because we haven’t had the budget for it,” said Burke Brennan, interim spokesman for the CEO. “All of the people who got raises were at the requests of their supervisors. And there were very few who got straight merit increases.”

Those “very few” include employees who work directly for CEO Burrell Ellis, Commissioner Connie Stokes and Commissioner Sharon Barnes Sutton. The raises in the CEO’s office totaled about $32,000; Stokes’ office totaled about $20,000 and Sutton’s office totaled about $4,000.

Records obtained by the AJC also show that Ellis changes the scope of work for several of his employees, including promoting one woman from a housing project manager to deputy chief of staff – a job that carried a $31,000 raise.

But other employees – including police officers, firefighters, sanitation workers and road crews – were denied increases. They ended up losing money from unpaid holidays.

Kudos to one person - Elaine Boyer - who did not give her staff increases, said she was shocked to learn about raises, had these words:

“The thing that frosts me is that I felt the leadership was supportive of giving furloughs and unpaid holidays,” she told the AJC. “If we start having a special class of people, it’s going to hurt morale and turn people against each other.”