Great Park Mowry “Retires” – Almost Doubles Pay

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As the finance manager for the Orange County Great Park, Kurt Mowery had a pretty sweet gig pulling in $209,761 (as a total package including benefits) as a City of Irvine employee charged with overseeing parts of that “work in progress” the Great Park.   In December of last year, Mowery “retired” from his position.  One would think that he was given a gold watch and headed to the golf course, but no, not in Orange County.  Mowery will receive a public pension of $133,882 – not a bad gig for doing nothing . . . but wait, there is more.  Upon retirement, the Great Park Board immediately hired Mowery back as a “consultant” so he never ever got to dust off the old golf clubs.  Better yet, he gets to ADD his consulting fee directly on top of his retirement payments – if things play out as proposed, Mowery will have turned an easy $150,000+ salary into a “part time” gig paying $332,282!  Not a bad deal – double your salary for half of the work!!  It gets even better, to “help” Mowery do his job, the Great Park Board is going to hire a CEO with a salary of another $200,000 to help out Mowery.

When we look at government waste, corruption and fiscal responsibility, you don’t have to look much further than cases like this to really get your blood boiling.  Double dipping must end immediately.  If Mr. Mowery wants to complete his work on the Great Park, he should have stayed in the City’s employee rather than milking the system to almost double his compensation.  The City of Irvine should be embarrassed to tolerate and encourage this kind of practice, it is corruption of the worst kind – they don’t even bother to do it behind the public’s back, they reach into our wallets, look us in the eye and try to tell us its for our own good.  Time to end this thievery.

About Geoff Willis