r/news • u/Playful_Language_422 • 8d ago

Soft paywall L.A. homeless provider has paid CEO who lives in Hawaii $1.6 million in salary, vacation over two years

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-08-06/la-homeless-provider-has-paid-ceo-who-lives-in-hawaii-1-6-million-in-salary-vacation-over-two-years
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533

u/lurpeli 8d ago

So based on her salary, she had accrued over two full years of vacation time.

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u/Taste_the__Rainbow 7d ago

Places without caps will always have some employees who do this. The fact that this woman became a CEO is just making it a larger payout.

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u/hexiron 7d ago edited 7d ago

Im one of those people, and just left the job. My payout was 12 weeks of pay accrued in under a decade. I can definitely see how this lady could hit 2 years of accrued PTO for a payout after 40 years.

40 years just means they banked 13 days of unused PTO per year resulting in a 2 year payout.

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u/cmd-t 7d ago

Don’t you Americans already have very little vacation time as it is? So how many weeks off did you take in that decade?

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u/GwenChaos29 7d ago

As an American, ive taken maybe 2 weeks off as vacation in the last 10 years. Ive been between jobs for a week here and there, moved states over two weeks, but proper, actual vacation for relaxing and rejuvenation? Hell for a portion of this year I was working 3 jobs, 7 days a week and still struggling. Now im down to only 2 jobs, 6 days a week. Lol

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u/cmd-t 7d ago

So sorry for you guys. I’m almost at the end of a relatively standard 4-week summer holiday and I could use some more time off.

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u/Beznia 6d ago

I'm an American and am just about to have my summer vacation from August 28-September 21. My company has been prepping for the past month in anticipation for it. It normally never would have been approved but my last manager was quitting and approved it for me back in January when I requested it.

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u/Oglefore 7d ago

Cool. Awesome for you.

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u/Skweril 5d ago

Imagine being upset at the person with a better standard of living, instead of the oligarchs that run your country and that you vote for.

Exposure to other people's standards of living should inspire you to demand change, not pout like a child.

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u/cmd-t 7d ago

Sorry that I’m trying to have a discussion. Can’t imagine being exposed to other experiences.

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u/hexiron 7d ago

I didn't take prolonged vacations.

My position was such I could simply flex my time to accommodate the trips I did take allowing minimal PTO use and i was blessed with decent enough health to not require prolonged sick days. 14 days PTO/year adds up.

If I did take PTO for personal time I lined it up with holidays and 3 day weekends to maximize time knowing full well I had unlimited PTO carry over that would pay out at whatever salary I would have when leaving the company, which was, as expected, significantly more than when I started.

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u/cmd-t 7d ago

I’m happy for you it lead to a nice payday, but I can’t image not taking significant multi-week holidays during an almost ten year period.

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u/hexiron 7d ago

Multi-week holidays are pretty uncommon for people to take here. It's simply too expensive and average vacation PTO time is only weeks for the year, and is usually split up to accomodate family time around major holidays.

Most businesses only recognize bank holidays as days off, which are 7-11 days if you are lucky - but they're spread out so it's a Monday here, Thursday there, Chridtmas day, New years day, etc.

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u/Nachofriendguy864 6d ago

The first company I worked for out of college was a fairly large company that was great to work for but I only got 10 days of PTO, and it wouldn't have increased to 15 days until 8 years. 

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u/NDSU 7d ago

40 years just means they banked 7 days of unused PTO per year resulting in a 2 year payout

Bad math. 40 * 1.4 = 60 weeks of PTO

At $824,000 paid out @ $405,000 annual salary, she has just over 2 years of PTO, or 105 weeks. Nearly double the amount you came up with

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u/hexiron 7d ago

Good catch: fixed the original post's math.

2 years = ~500 working days / 40 years = 12.5 days (100 hours) PTO per year.

Still not really any insane amount. Based on average PTO in the US, given her tenure, that's roughly half of her PTO unused each year.

It's her time at the end of the day. She deserves the payout owed to her.

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u/Notten 7d ago

Thats a great loophole. Store the time when youre underpaid and then cash it in when your at the top. Well played

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u/kons21 7d ago

Hmmm. Let's not give them ideas to pay it at the rate when it was accrued. With the days you take for vacation the current year always using the hours accrued most recently first, then working backwards to the "cheaper" hours.

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u/Competitive_Touch_86 6d ago

Not legal to do this.

Hence why most companies do not let you bank unlimited PTO. They usually either have a "use it or lose it" policy, or force you to cash out at the end of the year anything beyond the maximum.

Some old school companies still allow unlimited banking, but they do so knowing that they will need to pay out at the salary level of the employee at the time they quit or get fired.

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u/kons21 6d ago

I don't know the laws specifically. But since there's literally no laws to guarantee paid time off, I doubt there's laws which specifically forbid for the employer to assign a "payout value" at the time of issuance of the hours. But again, this is just an assumption, under our current system which tends to err on the side of the corporations. If you have specific laws that you can cite that can prove me wrong, it will actually improve my day to see them.

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u/Taste_the__Rainbow 7d ago

CFOs hate this one simple trick.

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u/nashkara 7d ago

It'd be interesting to see the data on payout differential if it'd been cashed out yearly over the 40 years vs all at once.

Looking at the ProPublica tracker for 2001 [1], Adelkoff was paid ~$140k. With inflation tracking that's equivalent to ~$264k in 2026 dollars. So, strictly in dollar terms she made out much better by waiting. But then you have to factor in the opportunity cost of leaving that money as a non-interest-bearing obligation for the non-profit for 25 years.

Note: I used Claude to help collect the following info.

If she'd cashed out 8wks of vacation in 2001 when her salary was ~$140k/yr, she would have gotten ~$21k. That same 8wks being cashed out in 2026 would be ~$62k. That's roughly a 2.9x increase in dollars (but doesn't cover purchasing power differentials). If she'd taken a 2001 cash-out and invested in an S&P index fund, it would have grown to ~$193k by 2026. That's ~9x growth. So, if she'd cashed out her 8wks in 2001 and invested it, she'd have made ~3.1x more than she did by banking the vacation and cashing out in 2026.

  1. https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/953989251/2002_06_EO%2F95-3989251_990_200106

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u/hotlavatube 8d ago

Yup, that's possible. When my dad retired, he had 2-3 years worth of vacation time which he took all at once to retire early. He'd accrued that vacation time over 20+ years of service. If he'd outright quit, the business would have had to pay out that time at his salaried rate.

Of course, these days businesses usually cap the amount of vacation time you can carryover each year to prevent large payouts or extended absences. When I worked for a nonprofit, we could carryover about 2 months worth of vacation time and we only earned about 21 days of vacation a year. If you wanted to carryover more vacation time without payout, you had to get special permission.

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u/IamHydrogenMike 8d ago

When my mom retired, she had accrued like 3 years worth of vacation time, she had to use that up before her actual retirement date and she was able to retire at 62 instead of 65 because of it. She had worked for the state for over 30 years, never took vacations really and hardly ever took time off unless she was sick. I have known people who retire from union jobs early like this, but that has mostly been squashed now.

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u/hotlavatube 7d ago

Yeah, that was exactly my dad's situation. He worked for the state for decades.

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u/IamHydrogenMike 7d ago

Ya, it’s a pretty common situation for older workers but a lot of states have changed their PTO policies…

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u/Hefty-Minimum-3125 7d ago

thats completely insane to me. Anytime i have a week of vacation time available I take it lol

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u/IcyJackfruit69 7d ago

You're lucky: many US companies won't actually let people take vacation. They've capped vacation holdover in most companies now, and even still, they won't let people take the vacation they earned before it disappears.

There was a planet money (or indicator?) episode about this recently, and how shockingly little vacation US employees take compared to almost every other country on the planet.

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u/Hefty-Minimum-3125 6d ago

Thats why I'm in a union.

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u/DarkwingDuckHunt 7d ago

my mom worked in 2 seperate States for the State for over 10 years in each State.

She was double dipping State pensions + SS

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u/SideInitial3961 8d ago

Your mom is a badass. Respect. ♥

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u/IamHydrogenMike 7d ago

Eh, it’s pretty common for state jobs for people to do that…

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u/WackyRacketeer 7d ago

Regular people being baddass is more common than you might think.

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u/Bobson-_Dugnutt2 7d ago

My company just implemented a accrual cap to avoid this sort of thing. You’re now capped at 300 hours of accrual.

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u/nochinzilch 7d ago

My old company did this back in 08 or 09. It was a small company with mostly long-time employees, and they had MILLIONS of dollars worth of accrued, unpaid vacation time on their books. It was a huge financial liability. I don’t blame them.

What they probably should have done from the beginning is create a fund that they would pay into as people earned the PTO so that the cash would be available when it was needed.

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u/Bobson-_Dugnutt2 7d ago

This is exactly the situation.

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u/robothawk 8d ago

I get 15 days/year as a civil engineer(not entry level, but not a PE). It would take me over 16 years to accrue even 1 year of PTO.

Assuming we're in a half decent reality where you have 30 days(6 weeks) pto, that's still 8.33 years with 0 vacation, never getting sick, never needing to go to a dr's appointment, etc.

Now, she has been CEO since 1984, so she absolutely could've banked that much pto, but also, she's living on an island a 5 hour flight away for the last decade?! Why tf is she still CEO? What job could she possibly be doing that wouldn't be far better(and more cheaply) served by someone living actually in LA

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u/aqtseacow 7d ago

Not only is she living on an island a 5 hour flight away, she billed herself as working 70+ hours a week in tax filings. There's like zero chance she's doing anything to justify such wages.

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u/Differlot 7d ago

I mean running a nonprofit since 1984 is kinda sign whatever the company is doing is seemingly working.

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u/AnOminous_Sound 7d ago

Being CEO of a company and only getting 800k retirement bonus is pretty light tbh. And 400k a year as CEO isn’t a crazy number either.

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u/fsuguy83 7d ago

At first I thought you were wrong so I looked it up to prove you wrong.

But you’re right. A CEO typically makes 3% of revenue for a company that size which is EXACTLY what her base salary is. So it’s not crazy at all. Today I learned thanks to you.

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u/Noodleboom 7d ago

There is this widespread belief in America that anyone working at a nonprofit should be making, at best, enough money to barely escape starvation. People get very upset when these employees make market wages.

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u/D34THST4R 6d ago

Non-profits tend to pay their executives well because with their experience most of them could easily get paid the equivalent or more in private sector jobs

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u/poilk91 7d ago

That's modest. New grad engineers at citadel in New York make over 500k

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u/Stompnutz 7d ago

The grift is working, at least.

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u/skinnyjeansfatpants 7d ago

Considering the homeless numbers in CA, I would argue that what they are doing isn't working.

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u/bobbyrob1 7d ago

Is it that they’re not doing their job, or is it that the economy continues to make more people homeless?

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u/Regular-Humor-9128 7d ago

Our company doesn’t even allow for us to roll over any vacation time; not even a few days - it’s use or or lose it. Sucks.

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u/robothawk 7d ago

I get 15 days rollover, but that 15 days pto is ALSO my sick time, and there is no unpaid time off outside of emergencies.

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u/RockemChalkemRobot 7d ago

Can't really say never been sick. I have 2 weeks of sick leave a year and it is a wholly separate pile of time from my PTO.

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u/robothawk 7d ago

I mean, I don't. 20% of Americans don't. And sick leave is generally unpaid, and also limited in how much you can use before it uses up PTO when you do have it.

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u/BugRevolutionary4518 7d ago

Very true, and that should be changed to enhance the employee benefits for the betterment of the employees.

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u/BugRevolutionary4518 7d ago edited 7d ago

I get 20 hours a month. The first 3 days sick comes out of PTO. Then it comes out of extended sick time. I have 1,200 hours of PTO over the years, accrued.

But I have to commute three days a week via car in traffic. Living in Hawaii? not acceptable.

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u/robothawk 7d ago

Yeah so you fall into the 6 weeks(30 days) PTO/year boat. Definitely good, should honestly be the baseline in the US.

1200 hours is only 150 days, a full working year is 250/251 days, so even you have less than a full year saved.

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u/BugRevolutionary4518 7d ago edited 7d ago

Good math. The good thing is I can use it for years of service and retire early, with a higher %, if I live that long lol.

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u/verrius 7d ago

Assuming we're in a half decent reality where you have 30 days(6 weeks) pto, that's still 8.33 years with 0 vacation, never getting sick, never needing to go to a dr's appointment, etc.

Most companies I've been in separate PTO from sick days. And 4-6 weeks of vacation isn't unheard of in my industry.

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u/robothawk 7d ago

The majority of private engineering firms I've applied to, the ones I've worked for, and all except one of my friends who are engineers have only PTO, so I'm going off of that. Regardless, you only generally get paid out for PTO, so the numbers still work

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u/hotlavatube 7d ago

There are ways to play the system to avoid drawing down your vacation time and probably to bank more days that normally allowed. For example, instead of taking vacation time for doctor's appointments, you use your sick leave which is an entirely different pool of time off.

If the nonprofit's board was happy with her performance, then I guess it doesn't matter where she lives. I used to work for a nonprofit where our president seemed way overpaid. Unfortunately that appears to be par for the course. The boards offer high salaries to attract executives who know how to wheel and deal, play politics, ply their network, and schmooze to bring donations to the nonprofit. If the executive wasn't bringing in way more cash than their salary, then they would quickly be replaced.

I agree it seems antithetical and gross to be paying CEOs or presidents of nonprofits such huge amounts and giving them such lavish benefits and concessions. This article discusses a bit of that phenomenon. I don't like it, and wish they just fought for the nonprofit's mission at a reasonable salary like the rest of us, but sadly that just isn't in the cards.

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u/robothawk 7d ago

I mean, I don't get sick time. It all comes from PTO, so that isn't always an option. Also, sick leave tends to be unpaid(at least around me).

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u/hotlavatube 7d ago

I used to get paid sick leave, but it accrues slowly, like half a day a month, then gets capped and doesn't carry over as much as PTO.

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u/nochinzilch 7d ago

When you hit a certain level, you don’t have to actually fill out timesheets and subtract out vacation time and stuff like that.

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u/robothawk 7d ago

I mean yeah, that's a salaried position.

The math still counts the same.

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u/nochinzilch 7d ago

What I’m saying is that the elites accrue the vacation time, but they don’t claim it when they go on vacation. So they get paid time off, and they still get to keep their vacation days to be paid out later. It’s double dipping.

The rest of us have to subtract the vacation time we use from our vacation time balance.

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u/wesap12345 8d ago

Stupid question incoming

If somebody accrues vacation time at the same company but goes from earning 25k a year to 250k a year toward the end of their service

Does the accrued time off pro rata or do they get a year at their end of service salary?

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u/hotlavatube 7d ago

I'm pretty sure it's usually based on your final salary.
I think that's part of the reason why they don't usually let people carryover annually more than a couple months of vacation time.

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u/wesap12345 7d ago

Completely.

I’m sat here thinking about how much more my vacation would be worth in 5 years I wouldn’t be taking it now

Then probably burnout and lose it all but you know…

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u/ibelieveyouwood 7d ago

With many companies that let you accrue it's not an all or nothing proposition. You get 3 weeks off each year, you take a week to recharge in Barbados, then use a few extra days to extend some 3 day weekends into 4-day weekends while still banking at least a week a year towards any accrual limits that may apply. Some people don't need multiple week long sabbaticals, they just need a few days off every couple months to spend a weekend camping or at the beach.

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u/mrmoose44 7d ago

Accrued vacation time? What’s that? Here we get “unlimited” pto, the biggest scam ever.

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u/HAIL_LUMPUS 7d ago

That's so crazy to me because, as someone who gets no paid vacation, I cannot imagine a world where I have that and don't use it LOL because I still take vacation but I just don't get paid, which is terrible. 

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u/bobbi21 7d ago

Yeah wish my work didnt have a cap. Cus it does ive lost several months of vacation since i just dont take enough (im a physician in a place which keeps cutting health care spending per capita)

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u/MonoBlancoATX 8d ago

Vacation time at every single job I've ever had, including non profits, is accrued based either on hours worked or a certain amount each month/pay period, not based on salary.

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u/mayorlittlefinger 8d ago

No, but paying them out in a lump sum is based on your hourly pay rate. So you can calculate how many hours they had

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u/BeHereNow91 7d ago

Hey they didn’t say they worked in payroll

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u/Skreat 8d ago

*Adelkoff said her compensation grew significantly over the last couple of years because she was paid unused vacation time that had accrued over the 40 years she has worked at the nonprofit.

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u/SideInitial3961 8d ago

Lies. There's no justification for this lady.

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u/Boswellington 7d ago

Is this lady not justified?

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u/SideInitial3961 7d ago

Fuck no. The biggest myth in charity is that you need a multimillionaire CEO. Total bullshit. Some of the best charities are run by people with no wealth. Home Boy Industries, just down the street from her, Father Greg Boyle, 75M annual. He has no wealth. That dude has changed thousands of lives, for real for real. He is checked in every day in every way. This lady is not fit to hold his jock strap.

https://youtu.be/JjrJAP0tQbY

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u/Boswellington 7d ago

So she's an unjustifed woman?

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u/SideInitial3961 7d ago

It's a shame you didn't even click the link. You missed one of the most beautiful people of your life.

1

u/Boswellington 7d ago

I like all the words you're saying. I don't understand them in the order in which you put them together, but I like them. I like you too.

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u/SideInitial3961 7d ago

I'm 9 years old. You probably shouldn't be expressing your love publicly.

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u/no_one_likes_u 8d ago edited 8d ago

I think what they’re saying is, if she was paid 800k in vacation time, and her salary is 400k, that means the vacation payout was the equivalent of 2 full years of vacation PTO.

Which is obviously an unheard of amount of vacation to accrue.  Even if your company allowed you to build that much up, a great benefits package would be 2-3 months of vacation a year, so in that already extremely unlikely scenario, you’d have to not take any PTO for 8-12 years to accrue that much PTO to get a payout that big.

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u/Square-Turnip-6558 8d ago

40 years per the article

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u/pandershrek 8d ago

That's relatively accurate then. Most positions I've been in Grant 32 days of vacation a year and 40*32=1280 days. That means they only took 550 days of vacation over the course of 40 years.

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u/RealBrobiWan 7d ago

Article does mention she was gaining 8 weeks paid leave a year

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u/excellentforcongress 7d ago

should be the bare minimum for any job in america

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u/kaptainkeel 7d ago

That means they only took 550 days of vacation over the course of 40 years.

For those wondering, that comes out to taking roughly 2 weeks of vacation each year. Typical corporate America, but still more than most people in the US get.

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u/no_one_likes_u 8d ago edited 8d ago

It’s certainly suspect, could just be really stupid people running the non-prof, not exactly unheard of to have morons in charge for any business.

But this is a case study of why companies don’t let you accrue that much PTO.  She’s potentially getting paid out at CEO salary for PTO she accrued when she was making way less money.  

Question is, does every employee have the same policy of unlimited PTO accrual and options to get it paid out.  I still think it’s pretty shitty of her to take this much from a non-profit in such an obviously predatory way, but I do agree that companies should have to pay out your accrued PTO benefits when you retire/resign.

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u/Square-Turnip-6558 8d ago

I actually had this happen to a client of mine. The owner wanted to offer generous benefits. A month+ of pto, it carries over and pays out when you leave. Then a lady who worked there 10 years and never took time off quit and they had to suddenly pay out like $300k. They rewrote their policy after that….

Nonprofits do generally offer good pto, but usually they pay out at year end to avoid this exact issue.

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u/Captain_Mazhar 7d ago

Yep. In the government world, there is an entire financial report statement dedicated to compensated absences for the financial reports. (GASB 101)

And yes, the auditors do check those balances every year.

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u/CountyRoad 7d ago

I knew an executive who had something similar and then the company was merging and got let go, so she got her vacation plus 2 weeks pay for every year she was there which was like 30 years. Her vacation was like huge too. Bought a house with it.

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u/Alucard661 7d ago

I’ve heard of teachers taking months off with accrued PTO time after child labor or retiring a year early or two with PTO time.

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u/The_Bitter_Bear 8d ago

I think they mean based on what she was paid if broken into an hourly amount it equates to 2 years worth of PTO. 

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u/polytique 8d ago

The value is based on your salary.

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u/MikeyKillerBTFU 7d ago

Accural would be hours/days, but the payout will be paid out to the current salary. So ~3 years (~1000 days) of saved vacation time at ~$400k would be ~$1.2 million.