CORE PRINCIPLES
Transparency
The El Dorado County Board of Supervisors are hiding something from voters. While they plead poverty and publicly wring their hands about the County’s empty coffers and the staff they just cut, they are now asking County employees who are asking for a simple cost-of-living raise in one of the riches counties in the state to make even bigger sacrifices.
At the same time, the Board has tucked away in their budget hefty pay raises for a small cadre of senior executives. Some of these double-digit pay raises funneled into the pockets of this small group average over $31,000 a year!
This is old-fashioned, behind-the-scenes cronyism. The few should never benefit at the expense of the many, yet that is the exact message the Board has sent to El Dorado County taxpayers.
What other pet projects did the Board fund while slashing critical community services and jobs don’t we know about? Taxpayers deserve a line-by-line breakdown of who got raises, what other special interest projects escaped the budget axe, and why.
Let’s unite to fight for greater transparency and work together to hold El Dorado County officials accountable.
Fairness
El Dorado’s East and West slopes can agree on one thing: lining your pockets at the expense of vital public services is just wrong.
To see the Board of Supervisors hand out automatic, double-digit pay raises to a select group of executives while summarily dismissing County employees’ requests to meet to seek a much smaller increase since January 2024 is simply unacceptable!
All the people who work and live here are asking for is a seat at the table — a fair hearing. That simple request has been greeted with silence by the Board. That silence should give us all pause, because that silence impacts us all. It makes it difficult to attract and retain new workers to perform the essential tasks of maintaining our infrastructure and protecting County residents’ safety and quality of life.
The facts: El Dorado County snowplow operators make the least of all Lake Tahoe area jurisdictions. County Department of Transportation (DOT) snow operations staff start at $36.91 per hour – up to $5 less per hour than Caltrans, Placer County, the City of South Lake Tahoe, and Washoe County. No wonder we’re losing experienced employees to neighboring cities and counties.
Let’s be clear: County employees aren’t asking for anything close to the $15-an-hour raises the Board rubber-stamped for its senior team. They’re simply asking for a fair wage.
Let’s unite to fight for greater fairness and work together to hold El Dorado County officials accountable.
Safety
Operating Engineers Local 3 and AFSCME Local 1’s 1,000-plus public sector workers are out there in the heat and in the cold and on the other end of the phone when there is an emergency 24 hours a day. They make sure our streetlights and traffic lights are working; our streets are plowed and passable; our parks are clean and safe; and that when there’s an emergency your calls for assistance are answered immediately.
That’s their job, and they don’t shy away from it. They are committed to maintaining our truly special quality of life in this County.
Unfortunately, the Board of Supervisors’ claims that they are committed to keeping our streets and parks safe and clean and our Sheriff’s Dispatch Center properly staffed are nothing but empty promises.
Right now, because of the Board’s budget cuts, the County doesn’t have enough drivers to plow our streets and maintain our parks. The County doesn’t have enough trained dispatchers to answer calls to the Sheriff’s emergency center.
We should judge our elected officials by their deeds, not their words. We expect those we vote into positions of power to represent the entire El Dorado County community, not just an insider few. The Board claims it wants to keep El Dorado County safe, but their budget places our basic safety in jeopardy.
As one County resident – a cancer patient who relies on clear roads to get to treatment at the local hospital – said at a recent public hearing, “This is serious, you’re dealing with people’s lives.”
We couldn’t agree more.
Let’s unite to fight for greater safety and work together to hold El Dorado County officials accountable.
Quality of Life
Transparency, fairness, and safety are the building blocks for a community’s quality of life. Many of the County’s 1,900 public employees choose to live and work in El Dorado County because it is a community where everyone can thrive together. We are all linked by a common bond to contribute to its success and then equally share the rewards of our collective efforts.
The Board’s recent budget moves send a distressing signal that they do not share that bond. Their budget priorities have created an uneven playing field that rewards and recognizes certain individuals at the expense of the collective whole.
These public employees are fighting for a community where they can afford to live where they work. When that happens, everybody wins. Right now, skilled and experienced workers are leaving El Dorado County in record numbers for better-paying jobs in surrounding counties. That’s forcing them to constantly hire and re-hire, train and retrain, and certify and re-certify new teams only to know that they will likely follow their predecessors out the door.
We all know that El Dorado County is a special place. These civil servants live and work here as employees, volunteers, and neighbors. They want to be able to afford to keep calling El Dorado County their home. That means paying fair wages so they can join us and live in a community that we can enjoy together.
Let’s unite to fight for a better quality of life for all and work together to hold El Dorado County officials accountable.