‘Oinkidy, oink!’ goes the union

Just when you think fiction might trump fact, along comes the day's news to prove you wrong.

As they say, you can't make this stuff up.

In 2010 we witnessed public officials in the California town of Bell paying themselves unconscionably high salaries right under the noses of the taxpayers -- their friends and neighbors -- they said they served.

In a city just a bit larger than Pahrump, the Bell city manager drew an annual paycheck of $787,637. The manager's assistant took home $376,288, the police chief pocketed $457,000, and each of the part-time council members of Bell made almost $100,000 a year. And then there were the generous benefits afforded public employees.

Good work if you can get it -- without going to jail.

Now let us meet the union officials who run the Clark County Education Association. They seem to share a similarly piggish appetite.

Thanks to the dogged reporting of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the public learned last week that the Clark County Education Association spends 36 percent of its members' money on executive pay -- an unusually high percentage when compared with other teachers unions, the newspaper's research shows. And that's not the half of it.

In addition to the $208,683 teachers paid their now-former top executive, John Jasonek, this union boss also found the time to run the union's Community Foundation and the Center for Teaching Excellence, for which he was paid the special little stipend of $423,863.

All totaled, he made $632,546 in 2009, according to the most recent available salary information reported to the IRS. Jasonek retired in 2010.

May I please get a show of hands? How many Clark County School District teachers out there knew their fearless leader, who perpetually whined about low pay for teachers, made $632,546 a year?

Anybody? I'm looking for one hand -- and, seeing none, we move on.

Six hundred thirty-two thousand, five hundred forty-six dollars a year. That's the check Jasonek cashed in 2009. Teachers will decide if he was worth it. He's probably living off a pension check multiple times bigger than what any teacher could expect. But that's another column.

When the newspaper approached union leaders in early February about the figures, Ruben Murillo, president of the CCEA, and current union Executive Director John Vellardita defended the $632,546 figure.

But once the number found its way to daylight, it burned through the union veil of secrecy, and the union scrambled into full damage control.

Murillo and Vellardita now say their former executive director's salary was "excessive," but that under their faithful administration, such piggishness doesn't happen anymore. However, they refused to prove it by releasing any financial records.

As useless as I think unions are these days, they remain a private entity. They have a right to clam up if they want to -- as long as they are spending their own money.

But as it turns out, this union does more than play "hide the pea" with their executive salaries to keep dues-paying teachers in the dark. This union also gets taxpayer money to perform alleged tasks supposedly designed to benefit public education.

Now we're talking about a whole different level of accountability.

If teachers want to pay their union leaders like Bell, Calif., officials, then fine. It is their wasted money.

But when Nevada taxpayers give the Clark County Education Association some $2.4 million, the public deserves a full and complete accounting of how that money is spent. And not just in generalities -- down to the penny.

So far, the union has been about as forthcoming about the taxpayer money as it has been about its own salaries. Given this union's track record for openness, it is only prudent that if the accounting of public funds doesn't come quickly, a grand jury might want to help them along.

Come to think of it, that is the only part of this story that doesn't shock: A union boss facing a grand jury inquiry.

Sherman Frederick, former publisher of the Las Vegas Review-Journal, writes a column for Stephens Media. Read his blog at www.lvrj.com/blogs/sherm.