Chatman Paid 9% Less than Other JP's. Here's Why...

El Paso County Commissioner's are paying Justice of the Peace John-John Chatman about 9% less than all of this colleagues. 

Chatman has fought the fact that he gets paid $88,916.47 (not counting what he makes doing weddings when he keeps as personal income and does not disclose to tax payers) instead of $101, 247.38 like the rest of his colleagues.

The decision was made by El Paso County Commissioners and is as a result of the Court's determination " that the judge engaged in poor employment management practices that unreasonably exposed the County to potential liability" according to a statement read by El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego at a Grievance Meeting - which is a public meeting. Click on this link to watch the hearing. 

Long story short - the Commissioners determined (for the second year in a row) that they needed to hold the Judge accountable under county policy for putting county tax payers in a position to possibly face litigation for poor management practices.

As I have mentioned before, the city and county are pretty different in terms of how they run. At the city, everyone answers to the city manager - who is then held accountable by city council who are elected by the voters. At the County, most department heads are elected officials and contrary to public perception, they don't answer to commissioners court but rather directly to the voters. So Commissioners essentially just have the "power of the purse". As part of the due process for the "power of the purse", County elected officials who have beef with their salaries can grieve their salaries. 

It is a noteworthy step for the commissioners to take because they aren't supposed to get involved in how elected officials run their offices. But they felt that they apparently could - and should - hold the judge's salary to a pre-raise level due to the aforementioned reasons. 

Its a big deal that the Court feels compelled to intervene to that extent. Its a public rebuke of the actions taken by an elected official that have put County tax payers and the County as an entity in an AVOIDABLE bad position. 

I've written about how much of a desmadre the JP court has been under Chatman's tenure. He seems more preoccupied with hanging pictures of himself in the Court than actually getting work down and nothing is ever Chatman's fault. Seriously, I've never met a politician less willing to take responsibilities from demonstrable shortcomings. Even Norma Chavez occasionally admitted her faults ever now and then. 

Chatman will never admit to anything being wrong and he is not shy about using COVID as the reason for basically everything that has ever gone wrong in his court. Meanwhile - every other JP and real court has somehow managed to get things moving in their courts during the pandemic. 

If you watch the hearing you'll see that the County's position or reason for his FY 2022 salary remaining at the 80 grand level is because of two main issues - allegedly  having employees work overtime and not paying them for it and allegedly firing employees without telling them they have some sort of deficiency or allowing them time to address the deficiency - thereby creating a situation where El Paso County tax payers would potentially have to pay out large sums of money. 

Seriously - watch the video because his attorney is hilarious. The guy doesn't know where Chatman's court is actually located. If he can't get the basic geography right of the court being located in El Paso, not Socorro as he said multiple times, then how does he expect to be taken seriously about anything else? If you don't know, the Judge's court is near Ysleta, not in the city of Socorro. 

Okay so lets get into the meat of what Chatman is accused of. As a union man myself, I'm obviously biased because I've seen so many instances of this kind of employee abuse so I'm certainly not objective but I'll do my best to lay out what I saw in the hearing. It was apparently a practice of Chatman to have workers come in to the office before their work hours to perform work and then they weren't paid overtime - or in the case of County employees - given comp time. 

The County's policy is to give non-salaried employees comp time instead of time and a half, which means that the County fucks workers from the get-go because anything above 40 hours is just an hour-for-hour comp time exchange instead of paying them time-and-a-half. 

There was also a charge the Chatman was calling a worker after work hours and the worker would have to take the calls because Chatman is the boss - and the worker was never compensated for the time. 

Chatman's lawyer had the audacity to argue that the worker was friends with Chatman before he was employed by Chatman and that the calls were personal and not work related. That might be the biggest stinky load of bullshit I've heard from a boss lawyer douche in a long time. You think someone is going to think they don't have to answer phone calls from their boss on their off time?

They don't have to. But do you think the average worker actually believes that? 

They don't. 

There are three, four depending on your age, calls you take your significant other, your children (if you have them), your parents (if you are lucky to still have them) and your boss. It don't matter if you were friends with your boss before they became your boss - if they call, you answer. 

Thats how it works. 

So Chatman's lawyer tried to simultaneously argue that he didn't know his workers were working over time while also making calls to them after hours because they were "friends".

The fact that no one called him out on that bullshit bothered me - but in his defense, the lawyer said from the opening statement that he's an employment lawyer that almost always represents management - so the idea of worker rights is something he probably is pre-programmed to not give a shit about. 

You think a worker is able to distinguish when he's talking to his boss and when he's talking to his friend? This is why organizations have policies that prohibit cronyism - to prevent situations like this one. 

Bottom line is that Commissioner's Court has to pay the bills. They hear litigation and instances of legal exposure in executive session. They are the ones doing the match every time the court has to payout for another case or settle a lawsuit. It makes you wonder how bad things have to get that the Commissioner's  decide to take this level of action against an elected official. 

And its so egregious that they had to do it TWICE! Yes, apparently Chatman is on his second year of his salary not being increased. 

Did you know that the Commissioner's Court had to pay taxpayer dollars to a a professional to come in and "coach" The Coach? For those of you that don't know, he goes by "Coach John-John" Chatman, when he's not insisting on being called Judge Chatman. 

He met with the coach a couple of times and then just decided to stop. I mean, come on - the Court gave the guy a life-line - a way to improve on this management decisions - and WE paid for it - and then just decided to stop going. If you ask me - thats a huge Will Smith to the grill of every tax payer in the county!

The sad thing is most of the electorate has no clue this is happening. Most of the voters - who will ultimately pass judgement on Chatman in this run-off cycle haven't been informed about this situation because news stations won't cover relevant stories like this - which is a MAJOR issue by any measure - because they don't want to be accused of impacting the outcome of an election. 

Which is horseshit. 

This is when voters depend on local media the most - because they have important decisions to make and this is the exact type of information a voter should be aware of before casting a vote. Media should trust the voter to make the appropriate decision based on all the information available - not impact the election by NOT covering something relevant like this.