“”The salaries paid after the raises don’t seem unreasonable if I where to hire people to do similar work in the private sector.””
I would love to see the private sector job equivalent to these in a state or ANY government:
Tourism Director =
State Bureau of Investigation Director =
Mental Health and Substance Abuse Commissioner =
State Banking Commissioner =
I have heard that argument for over 60 years and have never seen any private sector job that had the requisite duties of those agency heads created for a bureaucracy!
Fire away.
Simple
Tourism Director would be equivalent to a Vice President of Marketing for let’s say Williams Co. or Devon Energy. The director is marketing the state of Oklahoma to build tourism much like a marketing VP would do for a company.
Mental Health and Substance Abuse Director would be similar to CEO of Laureate Psychiatric Clinic in Tulsa. Needs similar qualifications to run the state agency.
State Banking Commissioner is much like the COO of F&M Bank or BancFirst. Needs to have similar abilities to manage the oversight of the agency to regulate state chartered banks.
Stare Bureau of Investigation Director does not have a similar match to the private sector, but compare to large municipal police departments in OKC or Tulsa.
The adjusted salaries paid to the people listed in the original article do not seem excessive to what executives make in the private sector for similar jobs in the state. The article didn’t even look at raises given in the past, when were they, how much and then was the final amount paid reasonable?