You might find this article at Forbes entertaining. In it you will learn of the many California public employees with salaries of more than $200K per year. I can only speculate on their benefit and expense budgets.
Just to give one egregious example the city of Morgan Hill is an affluent community of 40,000 people. Its city manager earns about $325,000 a year. The salaries of 171 assistant city managers average $201,550.
There are many reasons that people think American governments are corrupt from top to bottom. These are just more of the reasons. Eventually California politics will start cracking.
Golly. That must be one well run city.