Orange County Register

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It’s “reasonable and customary” for local governments to provide full insurance coverage to part-time elected officials, the mayor of Laguna Hills says - and many public entities do just that.

We thank Joel Lautenschleger for responding to our question about the insurance issue, which makes that part-time city council job much more valuable than it might otherwise appear, in a pure dollars and cents sort of way. (Lautenschleger’s stipend as a councilmember was just $7,484 last year; but the city paid nearly $24,000 for his medical, dental, vision and other insurance, plus $1,324 into a retirement account.)

He didn’t like it that we singled out Laguna Hills. “It’s insulting and demeaning to suggest that we’re doing this just for the insurance,” he told us on the phone.

“The 18 years I have put in to public service have been ones of dedication to improving my community,” Lautenschleger said in an email. “I am very proud of not only helping to form this city but to have it run efficiently, honestly, safely, and with tremendous fiscal responsibility. It is why we get re-elected and if you would bother to look at some of the accomplishments instead of being a mouthpiece for a council challenger, you would see why people have expressed great satisfaction with this council over the years.”

(We object to the “mouthpiece” bit; we do not have feelings for or against council challenger Barbara Kogerman, but we certainly do like the public documents she has forwarded to us.)

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Read the mayor’s response here

Why do people run for local office? Why are they willing to perch on those daises hour after hour, year after year, decade after decade, pondering sewer systems, street repairs, budget shortfalls and zoning updates?

Is it altruism at its purest? Is it a form of masochism?!

Certainly there’s great satisfaction in public service. And the prestige attendant to being a democratically elected representative is certainly nothing to sneeze at. But stipends for city councilmembers are notoriously low (especially when compared to, say, water districts), with the highest-paid city councilmembers getting just $1,500 a month or so, and most getting much less.

So it can’t be about the money. Or, can it?

Public documents obtained by a challenger in the Laguna Hills council race tell a very interesting story:

• Yes, the annual council stipend is low: just $7,484 per member.
• But the city pays nearly three times that much on insurance - health, medical, dental, vision, etc. - to the tune of $23,902, for a single councilmember, for a single year. (One Laguna Hills councilmember gets less - see details below.)
• The city also pays into the California Public Employees Retirement System for councilmembers - $1,324 per councilmember last year.

Some of them also get travel and meeting expenses of several hundred dollars per year…. Not bad for a part-time job!

Let’s look at Joel Lautenschleger (right), who has been on the council since 1991. In 2008-09, his medical insurance cost $22,164; dental, $1,360; vision, $301; life and disability, $77. The PERS contribution was $1,324, and he got $898 for travel and meeting expenses.

You can see figures for previous years for him, and the rest of the council, below.

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The silence fromLaguna Hills officialdom was deafening after we asked about the city manager’s $60,000 Toyota last week.

Bruce Channing didn’t return our phone call or emails, but he did respond to our colleague Alejandra Molina - saying, essentially, that he wouldn’t say anything.

“It’s just unfortunately inappropriate for me to comment and weigh in on a part of a political campaign platform,” Channing said in a telephone message to Molina.

Read  Molina’s story about how Channing got the maximum performance bonus of $23,000 (10 percent of his salary) last year, as the economy was crumbling to pieces.