A Frontrunner for the 2013 Bureaucrat-of-the-Year Award?

I’ve shared some outrageous stories about bureaucrats ripping off taxpayers.

• The chief bureaucrat of a low-income California city getting almost $800,000 per year.
• Cops in Oakland getting average compensation of $188,000.
• A school superintendent in New York raking in more than $500 thousand of annual compensation.
• A California government official raking in $822,000 of taxpayer-financed loot in just one.
• A Philadelphia bureaucrat, after working only 2-1/2 years, nailing down a guaranteed pension of $50,000 per year.
• A New York school bureaucrat simultaneously getting a $225,000 salary and $300,000 pension.
• California taxpayers being forced to pay a fired bureaucrat $550,000 for unused vacation time.
• An employee of the New Jersey Turnpike system raking in annual compensation of $320,000.

So perhaps it is time to create a Bureaucrat-of-the-Year Award to honor the parasite who best exemplifies the unofficial SEIU motto of “Better Living on the Taxpayer Teat.”

And I think we already have a very strong candidate for 2013. Ms. Dorothy Dugger certainly has the right skills, working the system to get 19 months of vacation time after being forced out of her position. Here are some excerpts from a story in the Washington Times.

A former official of the Bay Area Rapid Transit raked in more than $333,000 last year without working a single day after she resigned under pressure in May 2011. Dorothy Dugger, the BART’s former general manager, quietly stayed on the payroll, burning off nearly 80 weeks of unused vacation time, drawing paychecks and full benefits for more than 19 months after she agreed to quit more than two years ago, San Jose Mercury News reported.

But that’s only part of the story. Yes, she was grossly overpaid and, yes, she has been bilking the grotesquely lavish fringe benefits system reserved for the bureaucracy.

But she also got a big fat severance package! Sort of a reward she received because she was an incompetent employee who wasn’t properly fired by an incompetent government.

But no worries. Taxpayers are there to smooth everything over.

The months of extra pay were in addition to the $920,000 Ms. Dugger was paid to leave after the BART’s board botched an effort to fire her by violating public meetings laws, San Jose Mercury News reported.

You’ll be happy to know, however, that Ms. Dugger is willing to acknowledge that some people may not be happy about

When asked by the paper if she thought the payout was fair to BART riders, she said: “That’s a fair issue to debate.”

How generous of her to say this is a “fair issue” now that she’s already pocketed all her loot and left “government service.”

But don’t forget that there are millions of other bureaucrats still on the payroll, earning more than us while working less than us.

And while Ms. Dugger has some impressive credentials for the Bureaucrat-of-the-Year Award, she does face some stiff competition. John Geary, for instance, used his job as a welfare bureaucrat to perpetrate a welfare-for-sex scam. And Susan Muranishi managed to snag a guaranteed yearly payment of $423,664 for the rest of her life.

We pay, they play.

P.S. Let’s be thankful we’re not Denmark.