Even team mascots are paid better—much better—than cheerleaders: $23,000 a year. And the cheerleaders are required to pay for their travel and team-mandated cosmetics. The Raiderettes are also subject to fines for various infractions, such as wearing unapproved underwear or having the wrong shade of fake tan.   read more

The raises are not very large. However, the class-action suit in Los Angeles County Superior Court on behalf of the 1,600 judges and 1,800 beneficiaries, retirees and survivors maintains that California law obliges the state to grant the same pay raise to them as it gives to other state workers. That was 0.97% in fiscal year 2008-09, 0.22% in 2009-10 and 0.21% in 2010-11. Instead, their salaries were frozen.   read more

A study by the California Reinvestment Coalition (CRC) found that the 450,000 welfare recipients in 2012, whose average benefit is around $510 a month, pay a total of $19 million annually for ATM fees and charges and another $6.7 million for money orders, check cashing and other services. The average user is only paying around $5 a month, which doesn’t seem like a whole lot. But many of the recipients pay nothing and many pay a lot more.   read more

“In a nutshell, Southern California Edison is getting out of future litigation and hearings into how they screwed up potentially, so they're giving up $1.4 billion that they asked for,” said Ray Lutz at San Diego-based Citizens’ Oversight. But "on its face it's a pretty good deal for ratepayers and about the best deal that we could imagine.”   read more

Pumps & Dumps, a website devoted to schemers who traffic in the seedy world of penny stocks, nominated Sherman Mazur for the lead in a remake of “The Wolf of Wall Street” after he was arrested by the FBI last year and charged with market manipulations that cost 20,000 investors $30 million. Earlier this week, federal prosecutors dropped the charges against Mazur and eight others when it became clear that key wiretap evidence was inadmissible because it was obtained through a faulty procedure.   read more

It is unclear how many people may be affected, but former Washington Post reporter Brian Krebs, who broke the Target credit card story last year on his website, KrebsOnSecurity, called the breach “wide-ranging.” MasterCard confirmed that it sent alerts to five financial institutions with information about their customers who may have been affected.   read more

California's $410-million-share of the settlement, engineered by attorneys general in 49 states and the District of Columbia with five national banks, was designated for counseling and assistance to homeowners whose homes were threatened by foreclosures. Instead, the governor and Legislature used the money to pay down the state's huge budget deficit.   read more

State Auditor Elaine Howle’s report said EDD failed to participate in an expanded Federal Offset Program that helps collect overpayments by intercepting federal tax refunds and other payments and directing them to the state. Although the U.S. Department of Labor program has been successfully used by 31 other states, EDD determined that it could not make the computer modifications necessary to participate, the report said.   read more

The billionaire chose to stay anonymous, at least for now, because “he wants to keep the next of kin working hard,” according to Dovi Frances, president of Santa Barbara-based S.G. LLC. The guessing game over the billionaire's identity is complicated by the proliferation of mega-wealthy Californians. There are 111 billionaires in the state, according to Forbes, and about a third of them are in tech.   read more

The LAO said the CHP failed to make a case for the aircraft although the agency was specifically asked to do so last year when it received $17 million to replace four other aircraft. The CHP was supposed to file a report that included “an overall assessment of its fleet needs” but all it produced was a report that “simply states that CHP needs 26 aircraft to achieve its goal to perform 26,000 total flight hours per year and provide each CHP division with three aircraft.”   read more

Attorney Stanley L. Friedman, representing former Mayor Oscar Hernandez (who also sat on the council), told the Associated Press, “None of them are attorneys or accountants, so they relied on their legal adviser.” The city officials were paid big bucks—in addition to their meager salaries—to attend meetings of sham boards that rarely, if ever, actually met. Former District Attorney Steve Cooley called the Bell scandal “corruption on steroids.”   read more

Nine of the university’s 23 campuses levied what they called “student success fees,” a transparent attempt to ding students without raising tuition or assigning more traditional fees, targeted at users of specific services. These all-purpose fees, which are spent on academics and operations traditionally paid for by tuition, have met with increasing resistance from students, who have found more allies as the improved economy has turned budget deficits into surplus.   read more

Last September, state lawmakers passed legislation which blocks any local public officer who was convicted of a job-related felony from making any claim against his employer for pension benefits. Last week, Malkenhorst sued Vernon and the state of California in federal court, arguing that the new law is unconstitutional.   read more

The Los Angeles County South Bay school district has 6,600 students, so Fernandez’s compensation works out to about $100 per pupil. In comparison, Los Angeles Unified School District Superintendent John Deasy has a total package of nearly $390,000, or about 60 cents per student. The former Inglewood city councilman makes more that President Barack Obama, thanks to a colossal package of perks on top of his $271,000 base pay.   read more

County District Attorney Dean Flippo said more than 200 vehicles were impounded over the past three and a half years and many were sold or given to police officers for free. One sergeant was said to receive a car for every 10 to 15 he had towed. “I’m not sure we know all the cars that were taken,” Flippo said.   read more

A recently-released study of the country’s 50 largest cities by Alan Berube at the Brookings Institution lists San Francisco (2), Oakland (7) and Los Angeles (9) among the Top 10 with gaping economic disparities. San Francisco showed the largest increase in income inequality, by far, between 2007 and 2012.   read more