Bugged by Pest Control District’s Costs

* At the Sept. 1 meeting of the Orange County Vector Control District, the 32-member board of trustees, who were appointed by the various Orange County city councils, forced owners of 707,000 properties to add a $2.09 service charge to their property tax bill for 1994.

Did you know that the Vector Control District has 33 employees who worked 57,500 hours last year? And did you know that the total cost of salaries and benefits for the 33 employees was $1,979,270? That’s what their budget says. Using a little arithmetic on those numbers yields an average cost of each hour worked at $34.42. I’ll bet there are long lines at their employment office.

Next year they plan to spend $2,154,870 ($37.48 per hour, or $1,499 per week for each of the 33 employees) on salaries and benefits. The planned budget also contains $1,706,540 for contingencies and reserves. I don’t know how they spent last year’s reserve of $1,168,640. They must have spent it or they wouldn’t need more money now.

All they needed for everything else was $1,149,080. Less than $300,000 was spent on pesticides. It cost $16.45 in labor costs alone to dispense one dollar’s worth of pesticides!

It can’t be true, they must do something else! One trustee for every employee--say it ain’t so.

H.A. McDONNEL

Fullerton