Gov. Matt Bevin is defending a $215,000 raise given to the state’s chief information officer.
The six-figure raise raised a few eyebrows in Frankfort, coming at a time when state workers and teachers are seeing flat pay in the state budget. But the governor told reporters this week that the $317,000 salary represents a fraction of what Charles Grindle could make in the private sector.
"He has already saved so many millions of dollars," the Republican argued. "We're clearly underpaying him relative to his value, certainly not only the commonwealth but what he could do outside of the commonwealth as well. So I feel grateful that we're getting him for such a low cost."
Bevin said Kentucky has shelled out "unbelievable" amounts of money for incompetent work in the past, leaving the state with programs written in outdated computer languages.
"We still had people that we were paying... hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in salaries and benefits to people who are writing code in COBOL and Fortran, which are dinosaur languages," the governor said. "That would be like paying people to write our state documents in Latin."
Grindle’s raise makes him the highest-paid administrator in the governor’s office, pulling in more than twice the money Bevin earns in the top post.
While Democrats have said the hefty salary can’t be justified in tight budget times, the Kentucky Finance and Administration Cabinet says Grindle’s work has already saved the state $2.9 million and his new converged server and storage infrastructure plan will save another $3 million annually.
