Scoop o’ the day

Derek Willis links to a Mobile Register story about fiscal recklessness in the Alabama Legislature.

Over two years, the payments have ranged from supplements of a few hundred dollars per paycheck to one-time bonuses of several thousand dollars, the records show. The annual salaries of those employees whose payroll records were reviewed by the Mobile Register ranged from $26,000 to $59,000.



Payroll records since Jan. 1, 2002, that the newspaper examined also show:



The clerk of the Judiciary Committee, who draws an annual salary of $30,000, has received more than $16,000 in additional pay so far in 2003. That same employee, Patricia Chatman, received a $5,500 bonus in September — the largest single bonus payment reflected in the records and an amount nearly equal to her regular gross pay for 10 weeks of work. The Judiciary Committee is chaired by Sen. Rodger Smitherman, D-Birmingham.

Those numbers might sound like small potatoes — God knows $30,000 a year doesn’t go far these days, even in Alabama — but stories like these serve notice that somebody’s paying attention. Now if we could figure out how to expose the expense abuses of all the private employers in town.