Keep Scrolling – Budget Edition

I received a few emails about the budget a my reference to the mayor and his three aides costing the city almost $1M seemed to be of particular interest...
My math is below. The attached memo is the source of much of this information:
Mayor Bhalla
Salary - $118,000
John Allen, Mayor’s Chief of Staff (see below)
Salary - $124,500 (grew from $90,000 in 2018).
Stipend - $15,000 (no change since 2018, just different reason – now ABC)
Total Compensation - $139,500 (up 33% since initial hire)
Vijay Chaudhuri, former campaign manager and current communication director (see below).
Salary - $91,000 (for some reason this went down $4k vs his initial salary in late 2018)
Stipend – For OEM $7,500 (began this year)
Total Compensation - $98,500 (up 4% although also received some income as consult to the mayor)
Jason Freeman, former Assistant Chief of Staff, now Director of Operations
Salary – $90,000 (up $5K from initial hire)
Stipend #1 – for OEM $10,000 since late 2018.
Stipend #2 – for BA work $37,200 since early 2020.
Total Compensation - $137,200 (up 61% since initial hire).
Getting to almost $1M
- Total Salaries Mayor plus Three Aides - $423,500
- Payroll Benefit Load of approximately 30% - $127,000
- Total Stipends Three Aides - $69,700
- Police Detail / Security for Mayor – approximately 125% of Police Captain salary (50 hours divided by two police superiors) plus annual cost of SUV - ~$200,000
- Police Payroll Load plus Longevity of 50% - $93,750
- Total - $914,000 This excludes the approximate $75,000 spent on the separate constituent services office, a function historically covered by the Mayor's office.
More on the three aids. Keep scrolling is where I write about the political side on issues I think are important for the public to know especially when it involves unethical and dishonest practices that aren’t commonly known.
Mayor Zimmer only had two aids – a communications director and chief of staff. And in addition to communications and handling the mayor’s scheduling/business this office/team also handled constituent services. Mayor Bhalla started with his three aids and then quickly added a separate constituent services office to offload the function of constituent services to. So effectively he had four aids to do the work that Mayor Zimmer did with two. The City Council has tried to reduce this since the onset, recently by eliminating the office of constituent services. This was NOT the City Council firing the director in that office. This was the City Council saying to Mayor Bhalla – choose three aides, not four, to support you and the City. And Mayor Bhalla chose to keep Vijay, John and Jason:
- Vijay Chaudhuri, the mayor’s former campaign manager is the city’s communications director. He writes all of the mayor’s scripts including his Nixle alerts, has repeatedly lied publicly and maligned elected officials in his official capacity. He has also shopped bogus, defamatory stories about certain council members to the press in an effort to discredit them.
- John Allen ran for City Council on the mayor’s ticket and was officially the mayor’s Chief of Staff until recently. To demonstrate that the “mayor’s office” was reduced, he now has a new title, Associate Corporation Counsel but still unofficially acts as Chief of Staff. In his new role he is paid $12K more than our Corporation Counsel, fills a seat that was paid 71% less before it was vacated, and is paid 30% more than our other Associate Corporation Counsel who does 80% of the work and is a woman. If you don’t remember, John directed and scripted personal friends on multiple occasions to come to council meetings to personally attack certain Council members (including me) and write bogus ethics complaints and letters to the editor in efforts to discredit Council members.
- Jason Freeman, was the mayor’s deputy chief of staff and was recently promoted to director of operations, asked by the Mayor to temporarily take on the most important role in the city, acting as Business Administrator, which was vacated by Director Stephen Marks in February of this year. The administration began a search for Marks’ replacement that was put on hold due to COVID. The role is critically important and IMHO Hoboken needs a person who has considerable experience in health care, development, procurement, labor and every other issue our city faces. All city employees and functions report to this person who also oversees all hiring decisions. Jason is currently the subject of alleged political retaliation in a tort complaint filed by a Hoboken Fire Captain.
This… all of it, is just not acceptable. And even more it is not acceptable that all this costs taxpayers almost $1M. We asked the mayor to make cuts in the budget this year and he made very few as you saw. And in fact added when it came to benefitting himself and his insiders.
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