Nice Work If You Can Get It: Ex-City Official Earned More Than $330K Last Year without Working a Single Day, Report Finds

OAKLAND, Calif. (TheBlaze/AP) -- A top official for the agency that manages the San Francisco Bay Area's BART system didn't get a gold watch after she resigned under pressure in May 2011.

Turns out she may have received a bit more than that.

Former Bay Area Rapid Transit general manager Dorothy Dugger earned more than $330,000 the following year, even though she didn't work a single day in 2012 for the public transit agency, a newspaper reported Sunday.

(Credit: YouTube) 

Duggar stayed on the BART payroll for 19 months after she left her job...and managed to take home more money in 2012 than any other BART employee, the San Jose Mercury News reported.

Dugger, 57, cashed in nearly 80 weeks of unused vacation time, drawing paychecks and full benefits. During that period, she earned nearly two extra months of vacation, received management bonuses and medical insurance, and boosted her pension benefits by more than $1,000 a month for life. When she left BART's payroll in December, she began to draw an annual pension of $181,000, according to the newspaper.

Dugger said she was entitled to the money because she earned more than 3,100 hours of unused vacation time during two decades with the light-rail agency.

"It was time I earned my whole career at BART," she said. "It's a cost of having the option" to save the vacation until the end of a career, she said.

The value of her unused vacation days soared after she took the top job in 2007 and received a raise of nearly $100,000 a year because the unused time-off was paid at her final, highest pay rate - not her rate when the time was accrued, records show.

"She was still on the payroll? I did not know this. It's startling," said James Fang, a BART board member who tried to oust Dugger in 2011. "We have to look at this."

Some BART riders are also upset.

"I hope it becomes a big stink," said BART patron Mitch Roland, of Alameda. "This is an agency funded by taxpayers. ... They should have stricter controls."

The months of extra pay were on top of the $920,000 that BART paid Dugger to leave in May 2011 after the agency's board botched an effort to fire her by violating public meetings laws. She left amid mounting complaints about BART's service and cleanliness as well as her leadership.

Dugger told the newspaper she was proud of her time with BART. Asked if her lucrative use of vacation time exposed a fiscal flaw in the agency, she said, "I think BART's track record on fiscal management is quite solid."

Here's a video profiling Dugger, the 2012 Greta Ericson Distinguished Service Award winner for career achievement in the transportation field: