Taxpayers Struggle To Keep Deval Administration Growing and Well Paid

Last week, the Boston Herald reported that Deval Patrick’s transportation secretary, Bernard Cohen, has given his his own staff 195 pay increases, even after he pressured MBTA general manager Dan Grabauskas into rescinding pay raises to his own employees.

The state transportation chief who pressured T general manager Dan Grabauskas into rescinding pay raises this week said he won’t halt 195 pay hikes he granted his own staff.

“I think it’s pretty hypocritical for the secretary to look at other agencies and departments and grandstand when he has different standards in his own shop,” said Sen. Richard Tisei (R-Wakefield).

Transportation secretary Bernard Cohen asked Grabauskas to halt the raises the T chief gave 273 employees this week as an effort to “leave no stone unturned in restoring fiscal health to all transportation agencies.”

But at his own transportation agency, Cohen granted pay hikes ranging from 1 percent to 7.5 percent last year. Some of the annual raises far exceed the hike given to Grabauskas staffers, who were supposed to get a 3 percent raise each of the next three years.

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The annual raises, which Cohen has final say over, are based on merit and performance evaluations. Employees must be in the bottom half of the agency’s salary range and produce exceptional work in order to get more than a 6 percent raise.

Grabauskas granted an automatic 9 percent raise to non-union staffers to keep them in line with a recent union pay hike last week, but then rescinded most of the raises when Cohen leaned on him. News of the pay hikes broke shortly after Grabauskas hinted at a potential fare increase unless the state helped with an $8.2 billion debt load.

Adding insult to injury, the Herald reported today that the state payroll has exploded, even with the current economic downturn.

Gov. Deval Patrick has added almost 2,000 new workers to the state payroll in the past year even as he warns of dire budget cuts in the face of a $1 billion deficit, a Herald review shows.

And his administration continues to dole out millions in overtime, with nearly 80 prison guards raking in more than $100,000.

A mid-year Herald payroll analysis reveals that since July 2007, the number of state jobs has jumped by about 1,900, many of them new hires in the Department of Correction and MassHighway.

The soaring payroll comes at a time when the state is stepping in to bail out a debt-ridden Mass Pike and being asked to do the same for the MBTA, and the governor is requesting special powers to cut the budget this fall if the local economy continues tanking.

“It’s very worrisome,” Jim Stergios, executive director of the Pioneer Institute, said of the hiring frenzy. “It’s a problem, given that we’re probably heading into a recession, and we’ve been borrowing extensively.”

Barbara Anderson, of Citizens for Limited Taxation, told the Herald it’s time for state officials to get off “the gravy train.” They’re riding the gravy train alright… and Deval Patrick is the engineer.

Matt Margolis is co-author (with Mark Noonan) of Caucus of Corruption: The Truth About The New Democratic Majority. He also blogs at The Buffalo Bean. Follow Matt on Twitter.