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Recent salary survey shows that City of Springfield wages often were less than the wages offered for comparable jobs in other cities.
But a News-Leader analysis of public employee salaries shows that city government workers have no more — and no less — cause for complaint than other area workers.
Overall, city wages appear to mirror those of others in the community. As of February, the average hourly wage of a City of Springfield employee was $17.75, according to payroll records obtained by the News-Leader.
Read the full story from the Springfield News-Leader here.
The Center for Investigative Reporting has uncovered more problems in Richmond, California's public housing system. Two maintenance workers, who also live in public housing, were found to have double-billed for tasks, billed for more hours than were worked and charged overtime during their regularly-scheduled shifts. Overtime paid to the two workers totaled more than $125,000 over four years.
All time sheets from the two workers were approved by the appropriate officials and it is still unclear if the two men were deliberately abusing the system.
The unsupervised spending in El Chaparral is symptomatic of a vast community aid effort with lax financial controls. A network of more than 70,000 community groups has received the equivalent of at least $7.9 billion since 2006 from the federal agency that provides much of the financing for the program, Reuters calculates, based on official government reports.
The money is part of a broad government effort called the "communal state" that steers funds to communities, primarily through an outfit called the Autonomous National Fund for Community Councils, or Safonacc. But exactly how much money passes through this system, who gets it and how it's used are largely a mystery.
Read the story here.
More white students are walking the halls at Chicago’s top four public high schools.
At Walter Payton College Prep on the Near North Side, more than 41 percent of freshmen admitted the past four years have been white, compared to 29 percent in 2009, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis of Chicago Public Schools data has found.
The increase in the number of white students fulfills the predictions of education observers that minority students would be edged out of slots at the city’s top schools as a result of a 2009 ruling by U.S. District Judge Charles P. Kocoras lifting a 1980 consent decree that had required Chicago’s schools to be desegregated, with no school being more than 35 percent white.
Read the full story here.
And, it now appears, the Bay View Democrat also gets her own private law firm.
The Topeka Capital-Journal learned the months-long inquiry involves Parallel Strategies, a rapidly expanding Topeka consulting and lobbying firm created in 2013 by a trio of veteran Brownback employees who left government service to work in an environment where coziness with former colleagues could pay dividends.
If it seemed as though some scenes of CNN's documentary series "Chicagoland" were coordinated by Mayor Rahm Emanuel's City Hall and the show's producers, that's because they were.
More than 700 emails reviewed by the Chicago Tribune reveal that the production team worked hand in hand with the mayor's advisers to develop storylines, arrange specific camera shots and review news releases officially announcing the show.
Read the story here.
In October, residental properties in Oregon were sprayed with pesticides meant for a nearby forrest. Residents say the pesticides caused health problems for themselves, their families and their pets. Oregon Public Broadcasting looked into what oversights allowed this to happen. They found lack of government funding to test soil and improper record keeping to be major factors on why the government's investigation took six months and why residents are still searching for answers.
At least 40 U.S. veterans died waiting for appointments at the Phoenix Veterans Affairs Health Care system, many of whom were placed on a secret waiting list.
The secret list was part of an elaborate scheme designed by Veterans Affairs managers in Phoenix who were trying to hide that 1,400 to 1,600 sick veterans were forced to wait months to see a doctor, according to a recently retired top VA doctor and several high-level sources.
For six months, CNN has been reporting on extended delays in health care appointments suffered by veterans across the country and who died while waiting for appointments and care. But the new revelations about the Phoenix VA are perhaps the most disturbing and striking to come to light thus far.
Read the story here.
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