Gilbert Town Council Vice Mayor Les Presmyk, currently running for re-election, once again has made the news! The topic? Overspending taxpayer dollars. As a member of the transportation-authority board, Les Presmyk joined other members to give the executive director of the Regional Public Transportation Authority, David Boggs, $650,000 from public coffers to buy about 14 years of public service credit from the pension program.
Now public “servant” David Boggs will retire with an Arizona State Retirement System pension worth about $89,000 a year for life.
Les Presmyk defended the deal with Boggs, stating in a January 19, 2011 Arizona Republic article, “When we hired Mr. Boggs, he was by far and away the most qualified person to lead the agency. One of the things he required was recognition that he was walking away from a better paying job.”
Please recall that Les Presmyk is one of three Gilbert Town Council incumbents running for re-election (the others are Linda Abbott and Dave Crozier) who voted to approve the infamous Zinke Land deal back in January 2009. By the end of 2007, it was obvious to even the most uninformed person that land values had cratered. Everybody in Gilbert knew that…except for these out of touch big spenders of other people’s money. They forged ahead and voted to pay $300,000 an acre, without an appraisal, for about 150 acres of land to be set aside for a park 17 years down the road.
It’s a real shame that Vice Mayor Presmyk has no access to the media, or he would know that public pensions are collapsing all over the world. It’s too bad that he didn’t have the “vision” back in 2006 to see that deals like these are unsustainable. Not only are they unsustainable, but they are also patently unfair to the taxpayers. For him to act in such a cavalier manner defies logic.
To read the full article in the Arizona Republic titled “Arizona Taxpayers’ $650,000 Inflates Executive‘s Pension,” January 19, 2011, by Craig Harris, go here: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2011/01/19/20110119arizona-pension-taxpayers-executive-david-boggs.html#comments