Pols make bad staffing decisions

Paul Rivera is holding the box above.

From the Daily News:

A special adviser to state Senate Democratic Minority Leader John Sampson is set to see his $80,000 salary jump to $130,000 a year — and he won’t even have to work full time.

Paul Rivera’s incredible $50,000 bump — a 62.5% increase in his pay — comes after the Senate Democrats laid off more than 300 staffers during the past 17 months, sources said.

The raise will be retroactive to Feb. 16, but the real kicker is that Sampson, a Brooklyn Democrat, allowed Rivera to keep a special designation so he won’t have to work the 35-hour weeks required of most Senate staffers.

Instead, he can clock in for as little as 25 hours a week in his state job, freeing up time for campaign work, the sources added.

From the Daily News:

Paul Rivera, a top aide to Senate Minority Leader John Sampson, will not be getting his $50,000 a year raise after all.

“Mr. Rivera, who had voluntarily taken a significant pay cut in 2011, has agreed to forego the restoration of his previous salary,” a Senate Democratic spokesman said in a terse statement.

Insiders said that Sampson was under great pressure from several of his members who were upset after they learned about the raise Wednesday from a Daily News report.



From the NY Post:

City Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez today fired his cop-hating spokesman David Segal, hours after The Post revealed that Segal had served time in a federal prison for torching an Army recruitment center in The Bronx, council sources said.

Rodriguez's dismissal of Segal came a day after the Democratic Manhattan councilman repeatedly ducked Post reporters trying to ask him about what he knew about Segal's terrorist past, and when he knew it.

Segal, 26, is a native of leafy Litchfield, Conn., who was hired as Rodriguez's spokesman last March even after disclosing the arrest to Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s office, which conducts the background checks, sources said.

In January 2005, Segal threw a burning rag into the Parkchester recruitment center — and was carrying a note that described a “wave of violence” targeting military complexes in the Northeast.

Before he started a six-month sentence at Fort Dix, he described, in an online rant, his arresting officers as “pigs” who asked a bunch of “dumb questions.”

Segal served six months in federal prison and four months’ house arrest. He was on probation for another three years and ordered to pay more than $4,100 in fines and restitution.

Segal — who also has three prior busts for civil disobedience, including one last month — reiterated his anti-war stance when asked yesterday about the arrest.