The email chain is best known for one sent from Borba to Westlands Water District General Manager Tom Birmingham that included a racially insensitive comment about President Barack Obama. That resulted in Borba stepping down as Community Medical Centers’ board chair.

But it seems a Republican who had access to the Fresno County GOP’s Facebook page was unhappy with Amaral’s comments.

Not long after the April exchange, someone wrote on the Fresno County GOP Facebook page that Amaral’s emails were unacceptable and he should resign from Nunes’ staff.

The comment — which wasn’t authorized or the official position of Fresno County’s Republican Party — might have been quickly erased and largely gone unnoticed. But there was a problem: local party leaders couldn’t take it down because they lacked administrator privileges on the Facebook page.

So it stayed up — for a long time — while Fresno County Republican Central Committee Chair Sandra Lakeman tried to get the administrator privileges changed.

Lakeman is the newly elected chair, and the leadership team of the Fresno County GOP changed as well. Things such as Facebook were never updated. Someone, or likely several people, from a past regime held those administrator privileges.

Two weeks later — after Lakeman had to prove to Facebook officials that she was the duly elected head of the Fresno County GOP — she was given administrator privileges and was able to take the post down.

She replaced it with an apology:

“The statement posted April 10th regarding the Chief of Staff, Johnny Amaral and Congressman Devin Nunes, was not an authorized message by the Fresno Country Republican Party. The Fresno County Republican Party values our working relationship with our Republican Party election officials. This was a malicious attack against these individuals.”

Amaral said he believes the current Fresno Republican leadership had no role in the comment, and actually finds the whole thing funny.

“I talked to Sandra and others at the Fresno County GOP, and I take them at their word,” he said. “No harm, no foul, in my opinion. We all got a good laugh out of it.”

Dee’s e-mail is a response to a blog I posted Tuesday evening. My blog was an analysis of how power works at City Hall in general, and how power works in the Measure G campaign in particular.

I give you Dee’s e-mail as she wrote it to me.

The second part of this blog is my Tuesday evening blog with a Wednesday morning correction and several additions.

The original blog had received 19 reader comments as of Thursday night. The reader comments are at the bottom of the original blog posted elsewhere on this site.

***

DEE BARNES’ E-MAIL

To say that I was disappointed with George Hostetter’s blog, titled “Measure G is about who gets the power,” is an extreme understatement. It is difficult to understand how a reputable and respected reporter could include so much misinformation and inflammatory anti-union statements in a newspaper blog. I am afraid that money and power are corrupting and changing the role of reporters and news organizations in our country.

I understand how much is at stake with the Measure G ballot issue on June 4th. There is a lot of money on the line and unfortunately too many see this as defining moment for power and political careers instead of what is best long term for our community. It is becoming more and more obvious that the Fresno Bee has chosen sides on Measure G and is no longer presenting facts in a fair and unbiased way to the residents. I believe ideology, money, and power are the major motives and George’s blog was catering to the segment of our population that already hates unions and public employees.

Our national economy has drastically changed since 2008 and many labor agreements should be scrutinized. However, salaries and benefits need to be looked at from the top down, including managers and elected politicians; not just the represented employees. The media should present actual facts and tell the entire story.

There were numerous inaccuracies in today’s blog and the article that was printed this past Sunday. Here are just a few of the inaccuracies:

Overtime wages are NOT pensionable. Please see page 23 of the attached retirement summary plan or confirm with the city retirement office.

Employees entering DROP have a variable interest rate and are no longer receiving a fixed 8%.

Council Members do not negotiate labor contracts. The City Manager works directly for the Mayor and is responsible for the negotiated labor contracts. Council ultimately approves labor contracts but they usually follow the recommendations of City Staff presented during CLOSED sessions with Council.

Staffing levels, overtime approval, and garbage routes are decided by managers, not employees. If drivers were consistently finishing routes in less than 7 or 8 hours, the problem lies with the decision makers, not the line-level employees.

Local 39 offered to make changes to the “task” overtime system in the past, but the city wasn’t interested. It had nothing to do with the threat of privatization. They, along with at least two other labor groups have made concession offers that the city is refusing to seriously consider.

Lee Brand claims the driver’s contract provides for 47 days of paid leave but doesn’t mention that the Fresno Municipal Code provides 45 days of paid leave to all employees with 20 years of service. You don’t have to be in a union to receive those benefits and the 12 days of sick leave are only paid when an employee is actually sick. ALL permanent city employees, whether union or non-union, receive at least 13 holidays, 12 sick days, and 8 vacation days unless they are the select few that receive annual leave instead of sick and vacation. You should also look into Administrative Leave.

I will not even bother asking where George got the information published in his blog; but he should certainly be questioning the motives of his source. It is disappointing that City Hall appears to be encouraging the demonization of public servants and the perception that all public employees receive bloated salaries, benefits, and retirements.

I realize that newspaper readership has severely declined over the years and like so many other print publications the Fresno Bee is struggling. I have shared with George on more than one occasion that even though I may go days without even opening my newspaper I have so far refused to cancel my subscription because I believe we need local news outlets. My husband and I have been loyal Fresno Bee customers for around 36 years and even added the electronic version of the Bee to our subscription when it became available.

I realize that George “updated” his blog sometime this afternoon and apologized for his error. However, the damage was done and how many will go back and read the “updated” version? Unless there is a new blog or printed story that addresses the mistake regarding overtime and retirement along with some of the other inaccuracies and omissions, we will be canceling our subscription and sharing our decision with others. I will no longer support a newspaper with such an obvious bias against working people.

Dee Barnes

******

MY ORIGINAL BLOG, WITH CORRECTION AND ADDITIONS

Measure G is about who gets the power

by George Hostetter on May 21, 2013

READER NOTE: This blog has been updated to correct an error I made. Overtime is not pensionable for the city’s home trash drivers. My thanks to Marina Magdaleno at Local 39, Stan McDivitt at the City of Fresno Pension System and Fresno City Council Lee Brand for providing information in this updated blog. I apologize for my error.

The pivotal number in the Measure G debate — 1.3 million.

The pivotal concept — a funnel.

The pivotal player — Mancur Olson.

You know all about Measure G. I’ll be spare with background. The June 4 election is two weeks away.

The key question: What is the fundamental dynamic here?

Here’s my stab: The big prize is the unusual power to be found in residential trash.

Let’s begin with 1.3 million.

The city serves more than 105,000 residential trash accounts. Each account-holder pays her bill each month. She does this 12 months a year.

For the sake of argument, let’s say everyone pays by check. To round-off, 1.3 million trash checks flow into City Hall annually.

The typical monthly bill is $25.37. That’s $33 million a year from all accounts.

That’s a lot of money. But a key when we talk about something like trash collection (a public good) is the source of all that cash.

It comes from 1.3 million individual checks. On top of that, each customer writes her 12 checks over the course of a year. A small check written once a month — it’s a habit.

A few extra dimes on the monthly bill are irrelevant to the average trash customer. But multiply 50 cents by 1.3 million and you get $650,000. That is a big deal.

(As an aside, I attended in January a Saturday morning rally held by outsourcing opponents. It was part of their successful petition drive to put the outsourcing ordinance on the ballot. I chatted with the wife of a trash driver. She said she tells voters who like the promised rate cut in the Mid Valley deal: “It’s only $4 a month. That’s nothing. But it’ll hurt the workers.”)

Now the funnel.

The $33 million flows into the funnel. The money pays for a cash-intensive service. The $33 million gets smaller and smaller. No one in the public pays attention. That’s the cost of doing business.

Then the funnel narrows. Left-over dimes tumble out at the bottom. Lots of them.

The money is enough to fight over.

What happens at the funnel’s bottom is out of the customers’ sight.

A very small group benefits from all those dimes. After all, a funnel concentrates the flow.

Now Mancur Olson.

Olson was an economist and social scientist. He died at age 66 in 1998. He wrote “The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups” in 1965.

Small groups — business associations, farmer coalitions, labor unions — can wield immense power in a large democracy, Olson said.

The small group has clear, specific aims. Each individual member gets something substantial if the group succeeds. Everyone works hard for a common goal.

Society at large doesn’t have these advantages. Too many factions, too much friction. Therefore, the small group often achieves stunning success.

We now come to Measure G, Mayor Ashley Swearengin, Stationary Engineers Local 39 (the city’s blue-collar union) and Mid Valley Disposal.

Local 39’s collective-action success has enabled it to grab a lot of the funnel’s left-over dimes.

This becomes clear in a three-page document I got last week at City Hall. The document lists the total pay and hours worked in 2012 by the city’s 95 trash drivers.

The list has regular hours worked, overtime hours, leave hours used, and total paid hours for each driver.

If you add regular hours worked, overtime hours and leave hours used, you get the total paid hours.

A veteran driver makes $22 to $23 an hour as regular pay. Let’s say $22.50 for this discussion.

A regular work week is eight hours a day, five days a week. There are 52 weeks in a year. That’s a total of 2,080 work hours in a year.

Council Member Lee Brand says the drivers’ contract provides for 13 paid holidays per year, 12 days of sick leave per year and up to 22 days of vacation per year for an employee with more than 20 years’ service. That’s 47 paid days — 376 hours of so-called leave at regular pay.

The means the typical driver works 213 days a year at regular pay — slightly less than 43 weeks, or 1,704 hours of labor at regular pay. He’s paid $22.50 an hour.

Add it all up — 1,704 hours of work at regular pay and 376 hours of leave time at regular pay — and you get a base salary for a veteran driver of $46,800 for 2,080 total hours.

The list shows that only nine of 95 city trash drivers worked at least 1,704 hours at regular pay in 2012. However, 69 of the 95 drivers made more than $46,800.

One driver worked 1,239 hours at regular pay (29 hours a week for a 42.5-week work year) and made $66,086.

Another driver worked 951 hours at regular pay (22 hours a week for a 42.5-week work year) and made $59,707.

Another driver worked 517 hours at regular pay (12 hours a week for a 42.5-week work year) and made $46,056.

The list goes on and on in this fashion. The list shines a spotlight on how top elected officials and Local 39 decided trash drivers should be paid.

I don’t recall such a list ever being discussed by the City Council in open session.

The Local 39 contract and something called the task system explain why drivers get so much overtime.

Drivers are paid for at the standard rate for an eight-hour day. A driver who finishes his route in five hours can do the route of someone else (perhaps someone on vacation) over those other three hours and get paid overtime.

Bottom line: The task system encourages drivers to use leave hours in a way that leads to more overtime and fewer hours of work paid at regular pay.

This series of events has many advantages for elected officials and drivers.

It keeps labor peace.

It’s easily hidden from ratepayers. The solid waste division is an enterprise department. It seeks no profit. It merely charges ratepayers the cost of providing the service. Labor costs are simply added to the monthly bill. Ratepayers are told: We’re not gouging you — as an enterprise department, we’re only charging you the cost of the service. Labor costs are what they are. Pay no attention.

Overtime costs are spread over 1.3 million annual checks — the broad top of the funnel.

Overtime costs are hardly noticed because they benefit fewer than 100 workers — the narrow bottom of the funnel).

(READER NOTE: It was here that I explored the implications of overtime as pensionable compensation. This is where I made my error. Again, my thanks to Marina, Stan and Lee for correcting me. With their information in hand, let’s explore driver salaries and pensions.)

Trash drivers aren’t part of Social Security. The formula for their defined benefit pension pays 2% of final wages for each year worked to a maximum of 25 years and 1% for each year after that.

The drivers’ wages have seen steady growth. According to an e-mail from Brand, Local 39 received 3% raises per year from 2007 through 2010 and a 2% raise in 2011.

If trash driver John Doe’s wages for his last year are $46,800 and he worked 40 years, he would get $30,420 in annual pension (25 years at 2% each and 15 years at 1% each equals 65% — 65% of $46,800 is $30,420).

There’s another wrinkle in this. The city’s pension system has something called DROP — the Deferred Retirement Option Program. DROP allows a city worker to stay on the job after retirement, collect a paycheck and bank his pension checks in an investment account run by the pension system’s experts. The worker gets this investment account when he retires for good.

The worker can be in DROP for a maximum of 10 years.

Let’s say John Doe works 30 years, then enters DROP. His wages in his final year before entering DROP are $46,800. His annual retirement pension is $25,740 (55% of $46,800).

John Doe then works for another 10 years. His $25,740 annual pension is deposited every year in his DROP account. That totals $257,400 after 10 years. The city’s retirement system on average gets an 8% annual return on its investments.

Thanks to the magic of compound interest, John Doe when he retires could expect to have $400,000 in his DROP account.

John Doe would retire after 40 years with an annual pension until death of $25,740 and a DROP annuity that figures to pay him $25,000 a year for 20 years.

That’s a total annual retirement income of $50,740 for John Doe. His standard annual wage for his final year of work was $46,800. John Doe doesn’t get Social Security, but he does retire with income of 108% of his final standard annual wage.

There are many variations to this formula. Each worker’s situation is different. For example, if John Doe worked 30 years and then an additional five years in DROP, his expected annual city retirement (pension and DROP payouts) could be in the $37,000 range — 79% of his final year’s wages.

(An aside: Mid Valley Disposal will pay $17 an hour to city drivers who transition to the private hauler should Measure G pass. Mid Valley has a defined contribution, not a defined benefit, pension program.)

(Another aside: Make no mistake, pensions among workers in all of the city’s other unions are a factor in the complex politics of Measure G. Swearengin has said she wants 4% wage/benefit concessions from all labor groups, whether they’re in general fund or enterprise departments. She says she’ll get them through negotiation or, when contracts are up and an impasse hits, simply by imposing new deals. The handwriting is on the wall for the other unions: If Measure G passes, Swearengin gets her steady stream of Mid Valley franchise fees, and the economy picks up, she may lighten up a bit on the wage-concession demand. That could mean a bit higher final salary for these other union members when they retire and a bit higher pension in their golden years. I’m not saying this possible calculation of worker self-interest is right or wrong. I’m just saying it’s part of the rough, behind-the-scenes fight that is Measure G in an era of tight city budgets.)

The are three reasons why such wages and pensions are possible at the city of Fresno.

1.) The 1.3 million ratepayer checks.

2.) The magic of the funnel.

3.) The dynamic best described by Mancur Olson — small and highly-focused special-interest groups can dominate the majority.

I’m not saying this is good or bad. It’s simply the way the city’s home trash system works. Voters on June 4 will decide if they like this system or not.

But voters must keep in mind that the 1.3 million checks, the funnel and Mancur Olson’s principles work the same way on the other side of Measure G’s coin.

The city’s outsourcing deal promises a 17.6% rate cut for nearly two years. Future rate hikes are capped in the nearly nine-year deal. Mayor Swearengin says Mid Valley’s rates won’t hit their current level until 2020.

The Mid Valley deal includes 10 years of options with rate-hike caps.

The math is clear. Mid Valley in its first few years wouldn’t be pulling in the approximately $33 million that the city’s solid waste division now gets.

But Mid Valley right out of the chute would be getting 1.3 million checks a year at about $21 each. That’s not chicken feed.

And as the years move on, the number of checks flowing into Mid Valley would rise steadily. So, too, would the size of those checks.

This represents concentrated power in the trash industry on a scale never before seen in any central Valley city or region.

Critics of outsourcing say this power would be used to leverage City Hall into raising consumer rates far above the contract’s maximum. I understand why the critics say this. This fear might influence with voters.

But I’ve never thought this to be a likely scenario. There’s simply no reason for Mid Valley to risk losing a highly-politicized deal when the contractual limits already contain so much power and possibilities.

All Mid Valley has to do is follow the contract to the letter and it’s all but guaranteed to be the Willie Mays among Valley trash companies for years to come, if not for the rest of the century.

Just imagine 10 years from now. The extension has been signed. Mid Valley is getting 1.5 million checks a year from Fresno residential trash customers. The average rate is, say, $26.50 a month. That’s $40 million a year — guaranteed as long as the trash is hauled away.

The contract puts a limit on Mid Valley’s profit margin. But the funnel works the same way for Mid Valley as it does for Local 39. There are all sorts of ways to shake out an unseen dime here and an unseen quarter there (unseen by the public) in the course of managing all that money. All those dimes and quarters, in addition to the contractual profits, will add up.

They’ll add up year after year.

All of that money and power would, as Mancur Olson might say, be concentrated in a small, highly-focused special interest unit with goals determined behind closed doors at Mid Valley headquarters.

What would Mid Valley do with that all that money and power? Based on its track record, Mid Valley would try to continue to aggressively expand in the Valley.

Mid Valley would have to compete with all the other private haulers (some of national scale) for government contracts. But Mid Valley, thanks to its city of Fresno residential accounts, would certainly have a strong grub-stake.

I’m not saying any of this is good or bad.

I do know many outsourcing critics — among them community activist Susan Good, Fresno City Council Member Oliver Baines, and former Fresno County supervisors Susan Anderson and Doug Vagim — say this issue is the elephant in the room when it comes to Measure G.

The unacknowledged elephant.

The 3,300-square-foot colonial revival-style home on the corner of East Balch Avenue and Eighth Street in Fresno is known as the Mundorff Home. It was named after Mrs. Howard F. Mundorff, the wife of a retired San Francisco baseball player, who commissioned Henry Greene in 1917 to design the house.

Lewis, a Fresno State professor, and his wife, Nancy Ellis, have lived in the house for eight years. They are moving to Santa Rosa this summer and are putting the four-bedroom, three-bathroom home with guest house up for sale. The price: $349,000.

“This is definitely the coolest house I’ve ever lived in,” Lewis said.

The house, the only Greene & Greene design in Fresno, sits on half an acre and is shaded by three large Sycamore trees. Fruit trees on the property also produce pomegranates, grapefruits and almonds.

The front door opens into an entryway with hardwood floors and round arches leading to the bedrooms on the west side of the house and to the living areas on the east end. A family room with floor-to-ceiling windows overlook the center courtyard.

The tile fireplace, an element found in most Greene & Greene homes, is still in tact in the living room, but painted over. The ceiling is framed by wide crown moulding with decorative grape and leaf details.

A swinging door separates the dining room from the butlers pantry, a small kitchen with original cabinets and the maid’s bedroom. A small basement, a rarity in Fresno, exposes the craftsmanship of the home with thick redwood beams.

Two of the bedrooms have attached bathrooms with painted brick walls and octagonal floor tiles. A sunroom was added to the third bedroom in 1930.

A garage in the back of the property was converted into a guest house that can be rented out. The house is on the local register of historical resources.

To see a gallery of photos from the Mundorff Home, click here.

This is the first of an occasional series about interesting houses and buildings in the central San Joaquin Valley.

Submissions can be emailed to blee@fresnobee.com

Both sides of the lawsuit met at a hearing Tuesday afternoon to give their final arguments in the case. The lawsuit, filed by the Concerned Citizens of West Fresno, contends that the plant is required to obtain a conditional-use permit from the city in order to operate and that the city has failed to enforce that requirement.

You can read the full story here.

What didn’t make the final cut in my story was West Fresno resident Mary Curry’s concern about the health problems created by the stench that comes from the plant, particularly asthma which she suffers from.

Curry and other members of the citizens group are concerned about the health of current residents and the health of those will live in the nearby veteran’s home which is scheduled to open in the fall.

“Unless people live it, they don’t know” what it’s like to live there, Curry said.

In a bill being introduced Thursday, McCarthy followed up on recommendations made by a Government Accountability Office study he ordered. The study found, among other problems, that the Los Angeles VA Regional Office has a total of 25,322 claims, with 80 percent pending 125 days or later. The bill includes provisions designed to improve sharing of information, strengthen congressional oversight  and increase accountability by setting a deadline for backlog reduction.

The GAO study found, among other things, that the average length of time to complete a claim increased from 161 days in fiscal year 2009 to 260 days in fiscal year 2012. Moreover, VA’s backlog of claims–defined as claims awaiting a decision for over 125 days–has more than tripled since September 2009.

Other San Joaquin Valley lawmakers have authored their own efforts to aid the delivery of services to veterans. Last month, Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Turlock, introduced a bill that’s supposed to streamline VA centers’ access to veterans information.

The National Asian American Coalition, whose corporate headquarters is in Daly City, has a small two-person office at 2569 W. Shaw Ave., Suite 103A, between Marks Avenue and Van Ness Boulevard. The group also opened a satellite office in Hercules, north of Oakland.

While the office is new, the coalition’s work in the Central Valley is not, said Faith Bautista, president and chief executive officer.

“In 2008, when foreclosures were really bad in every city, the Hmong community (in Fresno) asked for help from NAAC to train them on how to help the Hmong save their homes,” Bautista said.

The agency taught Hmong leaders how to fill out intake forms and to identify the necessary housing and financial documents for lenders.

“We also did a lot of one-on-one foreclosure counseling,” Bautista said.

Now the agency is taking its work one step further by buying real estate-owned property throughout the Valley, renovating them and then selling the houses to families who have gone through its Project Renew housing education program.

The group bought 18 houses already. The goal is to buy at least 100 houses.

Rather than dwelling on the housing problems, the agency thought about a solution that would create jobs and help people who lost their homes buy again, Bautista said.

For more information, visit naacoalition.org or call (650) 952-0522.

The pivotal number in the Measure G debate — 1.3 million.

The pivotal concept — a funnel.

The pivotal player — Mancur Olson.

You know all about Measure G. I’ll be spare with background. The June 4 election is two weeks away.

The key question: What is the fundamental dynamic here?

Here’s my stab: The big prize is the unusual power to be found in residential trash.

Let’s begin with 1.3 million.

The city serves more than 105,000 residential trash accounts. Each account-holder pays her bill each month. She does this 12 months a year.

For the sake of argument, let’s say everyone pays by check. To round-off, 1.3 million trash checks flow into City Hall annually.

The typical monthly bill is $25.37. That’s $33 million a year from all accounts.

That’s a lot of money. But a key when we talk about something like trash collection (a public good) is the source of all that cash.

It comes from 1.3 million individual checks. On top of that, each customer writes her 12 checks over the course of a year. A small check written once a month — it’s a habit.

A few extra dimes on the monthly bill are irrelevant to the average trash customer. But multiply 50 cents by 1.3 million and you get $650,000. That is a big deal.

(As an aside, I attended in January a Saturday morning rally held by outsourcing opponents. It was part of their successful petition drive to put the outsourcing ordinance on the ballot. I chatted with the wife of a trash driver. She said she tells voters who like the promised rate cut in the Mid Valley deal: “It’s only $4 a month. That’s nothing. But it’ll hurt the workers.”)

Now the funnel.

The $33 million flows into the funnel. The money pays for a cash-intensive service. The $33 million gets smaller and smaller. No one in the public pays attention. That’s the cost of doing business.

Then the funnel narrows. Left-over dimes tumble out at the bottom. Lots of them.

The money is enough to fight over.

What happens at the funnel’s bottom is out of the customers’ sight.

A very small group benefits from all those dimes. After all, a funnel concentrates the flow.

Now Mancur Olson.

Olson was an economist and social scientist. He died at age 66 in 1998. He wrote “The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups” in 1965.

Small groups — business associations, farmer coalitions, labor unions — can wield immense power in a large democracy, Olson said.

The small group has clear, specific aims. Each individual member gets something substantial if the group succeeds. Everyone works hard for a common goal.

Society at large doesn’t have these advantages. Too many factions, too much friction. Therefore, the small group often achieves stunning success.

We now come to Measure G, Mayor Ashley Swearengin, Stationary Engineers Local 39 (the city’s blue-collar union) and Mid Valley Disposal.

Local 39’s collective-action success has enabled it to grab a lot of the funnel’s left-over dimes.

This becomes clear in a three-page document I got last week at City Hall. The document lists the total pay and hours worked in 2012 by the city’s 95 trash drivers.

The list has regular hours worked, overtime hours, leave hours used, and total paid hours for each driver.

If you add regular hours worked, overtime hours and leave hours used, you get the total paid hours.

A veteran driver makes $22 to $23 an hour as regular pay. Let’s say $22.50 for this discussion.

A regular work week is eight hours a day, five days a week. There are 52 weeks in a year. That’s a total of 2,080 work hours in a year.

Council Member Lee Brand says the drivers’ contract provides for 13 paid holidays per year, 12 days of sick leave per year and up to 22 days of vacation per year for an employee with more than 20 years’ service. That’s 47 paid days — 376 hours of so-called leave at regular pay.

The means the typical driver works 213 days a year at regular pay — slightly less than 43 weeks, or 1,704 hours of labor at regular pay. He’s paid $22.50 an hour.

Add it all up — 1,704 hours of work at regular pay and 376 hours of leave time at regular pay — and you get a base salary for a veteran driver of $46,800 for 2,080 total hours.

The list shows that only nine of 95 city trash drivers worked at least 1,704 hours at regular pay in 2012. However, 69 of the 95 drivers made more than $46,800.

One driver worked 1,239 hours at regular pay (29 hours a week for a 42.5-week work year) and made $66,086.

Another driver worked 951 hours at regular pay (22 hours a week for a 42.5-week work year) and made $59,707.

Another driver worked 517 hours at regular pay (12 hours a week for a 42.5-week work year) and made $46,056.

The list goes on and on in this fashion. The list shines a spotlight on how top elected officials and Local 39 decided trash drivers should be paid.

I don’t recall such a list ever being discussed by the City Council in open session.

The Local 39 contract and something called the task system explain why drivers get so much overtime.

Drivers are paid for at the standard rate for an eight-hour day. A driver who finishes his route in five hours can do the route of someone else (perhaps someone on vacation) over those other three hours and get paid overtime.

Bottom line: The task system encourages drivers to use leave hours in a way that leads to more overtime and fewer hours of work paid at regular pay.

This series of events has many advantages for elected officials and drivers.

It keeps labor peace.

It’s easily hidden from ratepayers. The solid waste division is an enterprise department. It seeks no profit. It merely charges ratepayers the cost of providing the service. Labor costs are simply added to the monthly bill. Ratepayers are told: We’re not gouging you — as an enterprise department, we’re only charging you the cost of the service. Labor costs are what they are. Pay no attention.

Overtime costs are spread over 1.3 million annual checks — the broad top of the funnel.

Overtime costs are hardly noticed because they benefit fewer than 100 workers — the narrow bottom of the funnel).

(READER NOTE: It was here that I explored the implications of overtime as pensionable compensation. This is where I made my error. Again, my thanks to Marina, Stan and Lee for correcting me. With their information in hand, let’s explore driver salaries and pensions.)

Trash drivers aren’t part of Social Security. The formula for their defined benefit pension pays 2% of final wages for each year worked to a maximum of 25 years and 1% for each year after that.

The drivers’ wages have seen steady growth. According to an e-mail from Brand, Local 39 received 3% raises per year from 2007 through 2010 and a 2% raise in 2011.

If trash driver John Doe’s wages for his last year are $46,800 and he worked 40 years, he would get $30,420 in annual pension (25 years at 2% each and 15 years at 1% each equals 65% — 65% of $46,800 is $30,420).

There’s another wrinkle in this. The city’s pension system has something called DROP — the Deferred Retirement Option Program. DROP allows a city worker to stay on the job after retirement, collect a paycheck and bank his pension checks in an investment account run by the pension system’s experts. The worker gets this investment account when he retires for good.

The worker can be in DROP for a maximum of 10 years.

Let’s say John Doe works 30 years, then enters DROP. His wages in his final year before entering DROP are $46,800. His annual retirement pension is $25,740 (55% of $46,800).

John Doe then works for another 10 years. His $25,740 annual pension is deposited every year in his DROP account. That totals $257,400 after 10 years. The city’s retirement system on average gets an 8% annual return on its investments.

Thanks to the magic of compound interest, John Doe when he retires could expect to have $400,000 in his DROP account.

John Doe would retire after 40 years with an annual pension until death of $25,740 and a DROP annuity that figures to pay him $25,000 a year for 20 years.

That’s a total annual retirement income of $50,740 for John Doe. His standard annual wage for his final year of work was $46,800. John Doe doesn’t get Social Security, but he does retire with income of 108% of his final standard annual wage.

There are many variations to this formula. Each worker’s situation is different. For example, if John Doe worked 30 years and then an additional five years in DROP, his expected annual city retirement (pension and DROP payouts) could be in the $37,000 range — 79% of his final year’s wages.

(An aside: Mid Valley Disposal will pay $17 an hour to city drivers who transition to the private hauler should Measure G pass. Mid Valley has a defined contribution, not a defined benefit, pension program.)

(Another aside: Make no mistake, pensions among workers in all of the city’s other unions are a factor in the complex politics of Measure G. Swearengin has said she wants 4% wage/benefit concessions from all labor groups, whether they’re in general fund or enterprise departments. She says she’ll get them through negotiation or, when contracts are up and an impasse hits, simply by imposing new deals. The handwriting is on the wall for the other unions: If Measure G passes, Swearengin gets her steady stream of Mid Valley franchise fees, and the economy picks up, she may lighten up a bit on the wage-concession demand. That could mean a bit higher final salary for these other union members when they retire and a bit higher pension in their golden years. I’m not saying this possible calculation of worker self-interest is right or wrong. I’m just saying it’s part of the rough, behind-the-scenes fight that is Measure G in an era of tight city budgets.)

The are three reasons why such wages and pensions are possible at the city of Fresno.

1.) The 1.3 million ratepayer checks.

2.) The magic of the funnel.

3.) The dynamic best described by Mancur Olson — small and highly-focused special-interest groups can dominate the majority.

I’m not saying this is good or bad. It’s simply the way the city’s home trash system works. Voters on June 4 will decide if they like this system or not.

But voters must keep in mind that the 1.3 million checks, the funnel and Mancur Olson’s principles work the same way on the other side of Measure G’s coin.

The city’s outsourcing deal promises a 17.6% rate cut for nearly two years. Future rate hikes are capped in the nearly nine-year deal. Mayor Swearengin says Mid Valley’s rates won’t hit their current level until 2020.

The Mid Valley deal includes 10 years of options with rate-hike caps.

The math is clear. Mid Valley in its first few years wouldn’t be pulling in the approximately $33 million that the city’s solid waste division now gets.

But Mid Valley right out of the chute would be getting 1.3 million checks a year at about $21 each. That’s not chicken feed.

And as the years move on, the number of checks flowing into Mid Valley would rise steadily. So, too, would the size of those checks.

This represents concentrated power in the trash industry on a scale never before seen in any central Valley city or region.

Critics of outsourcing say this power would be used to leverage City Hall into raising consumer rates far above the contract’s maximum. I understand why the critics say this. This fear might influence with voters.

But I’ve never thought this to be a likely scenario. There’s simply no reason for Mid Valley to risk losing a highly-politicized deal when the contractual limits already contain so much power and possibilities.

All Mid Valley has to do is follow the contract to the letter and it’s all but guaranteed to be the Willie Mays among Valley trash companies for years to come, if not for the rest of the century.

Just imagine 10 years from now. The extension has been signed. Mid Valley is getting 1.5 million checks a year from Fresno residential trash customers. The average rate is, say, $26.50 a month. That’s $40 million a year — guaranteed as long as the trash is hauled away.

The contract puts a limit on Mid Valley’s profit margin. But the funnel works the same way for Mid Valley as it does for Local 39. There are all sorts of ways to shake out an unseen dime here and an unseen quarter there (unseen by the public) in the course of managing all that money. All those dimes and quarters, in addition to the contractual profits, will add up.

They’ll add up year after year.

All of that money and power would, as Mancur Olson might say, be concentrated in a small, highly-focused special interest unit with goals determined behind closed doors at Mid Valley headquarters.

What would Mid Valley do with that all that money and power? Based on its track record, Mid Valley would try to continue to aggressively expand in the Valley.

Mid Valley would have to compete with all the other private haulers (some of national scale) for government contracts. But Mid Valley, thanks to its city of Fresno residential accounts, would certainly have a strong grub-stake.

I’m not saying any of this is good or bad.

I do know many outsourcing critics — among them community activist Susan Good, Fresno City Council Member Oliver Baines, and former Fresno County supervisors Susan Anderson and Doug Vagim — say this issue is the elephant in the room when it comes to Measure G.

The unacknowledged elephant.

Several hantavirus cases were diagnosed after people spent the night at Curry Village in newer tent cabins with a double-wall construction. Investigation showed infected mice nested between the walls.

The tent cabins were shut down last year after the outbreak was discovered.

There have been reports that the tent cabins were torn down and replaced with the old, single-wall version. But Yosemite officials were not immediately available to confirm the reports.

The Interior Department’s Office of Inspector General investigated last summer’s outbreak and last week reported that park officials responded appropriately in accordance with policy.

At least eight of the nine tourists who fell ill stayed in the newer tent cabins, which are operated by the private concessionaire, Delaware North Parks and Resorts.

The concessionaire had added rafters and wall studs to the tent cabins. Park Service policy did not require park leaders to approve the design changes because they were considered routine maintenance.

Now the machines are gone, according to California Rural Legal Assistance, representing Lanare’s 590 residents. The machines apparently were not filtering the water in Riverdale, which also has arsenic contamination.

CRLA said water from the machines was tested at more than three times the safe level. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says the threshold is 10 parts per billion.

Instead of the four-mile drive to Riverdale, Lanare residents must drive as far as Fresno, 20 miles away, to buy water for drinking and cooking.

As part of a series titled Living in a Toxic Land, The Bee published a story last month about the environmental risks people must live with every day in Lanare.

The town has no schools, health care or sewer service. The tainted well water is the most immediate problem.

Veronica Garibay, a CRLA community education outreach coordinator, says the Lanare Community Service District has applied to the California Department of Public Health for $50,000 to fund interim water solutions. Some of the money could help provide a water vending machine in Lanare.

If the town gets the money, the machine could be installed at the Lanare Community Center.