Last summer the Herald Leader provided the salaries of state employees. I think this is a good thing. I have this narrow minded idea that they really are spending my money. And I like to know who is getting the money.
Recently the Commissioner of the Commonwealth’s Office of Technology, Mike Inman, got the bum’s rush out of office. The general feeling was that he wasn’t loyal enough to the Governor and had to go.
Mark Rutledge was put in charge. Rutledge has been a Fletcher loyalist from the beginning. He moved from Branch Manager to Commissioner in less than three years.
This was really pretty slow given how this administration has handled personnel actions.
So I was wondering, how much we were paying Rutledge and his brain trust? The best guess is about $431,000 per year, although, since those numbers are from last summer they are probably a little low.
Here’s the breakdown:
Mark Rutledge $95,000
Tom Ferree $90,143
Rick Boggs $85,000
Rob Trimble $72,500
Vibhas Chandrachood $88,500
Ok, now for the boring stuff, but stay with me.
The Commonwealth’s Office of Technology (COT) is a zero based budget operation. That means they get all of their money by billing other agencies for work done. For example if you need a system to track sex offenders then COT writes the system or contracts some to write the system.
COT names the price, which includes over head like the salaries of the group above.
COT also maintains a site called GotSource. This site contains years of documents, mostly boring, relating to COT.
But occasionally there is a gem like this one.
One line in this document shows why Fletcher and his administration just don’t get it. Just like the merit system hiring scandal, financial accountability doesn’t seem to be a strong point.
“We typically do not bill the governor’s office for work done specifically for them. I believe we just charge those hours to overhead.”
So just like the group of Fletcher loyalists above, all of the computer work done for the Governor is paid by some other program, grant or tax. The costs are not accountable to the Governor or his staff.
