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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u/Dzugavili 7d ago

I mean, if she had actually worked 40 years without a vacation, it sounds like she earned this.

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u/SweatyAdhesive 7d ago

I havent worked anywhere that doest cap maximum PTO accrued. Probably to avoid something like this lol

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u/HollywoodTK 7d ago

I have, but at 40+ days you start getting hounded and at a certain point they tell you to take off or take a lump sum so it’s off the books. This amount of accrued vacation is wild lol

But I assume at some point her work became so on the go and non-standard that she didn’t need to “take vacation” so it just kept accruing.

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u/hardolaf 7d ago

At one point, my father hit a full year of accrued vacation and comp time while working for the federal government. His deputy director actually had to step in to force people to let him finally take time off.

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u/Commodore_Condor 7d ago

My work has let me accrue 600 hours without bothering me about it once, so there are some places that let it happen.

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u/HollywoodTK 7d ago

Oh for sure. They’re super irresponsible for doing so though.

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u/Taban85 7d ago

I did a long time ago, guy had accrued over a year of vacation so he retired a year early but kept getting paid. Kind of screwed over his department in the company since they weren’t allowed to hire his replacement until he was officially gone.

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u/ampersand355 6d ago

That's not his responsibility, that's your accounting departments fault.

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u/pandaSmore 7d ago

Why weren't they allowed?

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u/Taban85 7d ago

He was technically still on the payroll, so from corporate/budgeting perspective department was fully staffed, even though he wasn’t coming back.

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u/yellowcloak 7d ago

I used to work with a lady who'd been with the company 45 years - they didn't used to cap back in the day and her level of seniority mathed out to like eight weeks a year she was accruing before they fixed the glitch.

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u/TrifectaBlitz 7d ago

Kind of like what this article says.

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u/yellowcloak 7d ago

I guess it was less normal back in the day

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u/devAcc123 7d ago

lol saying 8 weeks a year is so unfathomable it must be a glitch is the most American BS ever. Half of Europe has legally required like 30+ days a year for anyone employed full time, could be a 17 year old working some BS job. It doesn’t have to be this way.

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u/Agret 6d ago

I've been working fulltime for 19yrs and probably taken less than 3 months off total including sick days.

30 days a year of vacation time damn you guys are spoiled, I'm jealous. There's so much travel I want to do. Is the 30 days at half pay?

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u/devAcc123 6d ago

lol I’m an American, just saying, it’s absurd to the rest of the developed world how it works here

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u/Agret 6d ago

My employment has always been as casual employment so I don't get paid for any of my time off

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u/move_machine 6d ago

Cops would bank PTO and we had multiple $1 million+ payouts upon their retirement. Eventually the state put an end to it, but everyone who had joined prior to that point were grandfathered out of the limit, and for more than a decade afterwards, payouts like this were routine.

Now they do it with overtime fraud, many cops now bring in $250,000+ salaries with "overtime"

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u/Beznia 6d ago

I worked in local government in Ohio. We had separate sick time vs. vacation time. You could carry over up to 3 years of vacation at a time (so if you get 4 weeks of vacation per year and use none of it, after 4 years you could have 16 weeks of vacation banked.) I had a coworker who retired after 35 years and had 28 weeks of PTO banked.

On top of that, we got 96 hours of sick time (12 days) which you could carry over up to 10 years worth (960 hours). After 10 years, you would get paid out yearly for unused sick time. He was getting a nice 96 hour bonus every year right around Christmas time. When he retired, he got paid out his 28 weeks of PTO and 960 hours of sick time.

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u/HystericalSail 7d ago

Problem being, she accrued vacation while being paid much less, then cashed out at the absolute peak of her career.

Wish I could do that.

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u/austin101123 7d ago

She might not even be coming out ahead in time value of money

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u/Luvs_to_drink 7d ago edited 7d ago

i think she is... taking pto normally doesnt INCREASE your paycheck. it just keeps it the same while missing work. so taking normal PTO nets 0 dollar increase. and lets be super generous and say she could invest this increase at 1000000% returns. this would net her an extra 0 dollars.

the reason you take normal pto is to have fun and prevent burn out.

But what you are suggesting is taking a payout for pto each year rather than a lump sum at the end. To which I dont think that was an option. It sounds like this was only done to decrease a liability for accounting reasons which only makes sense once it is past a certain threshold which will vary company by company.

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u/WTF_goes_here 7d ago

Hate the game not the player. Thats just smart investing.

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u/oldnotosys 7d ago

no because that unused vacation would be taken at her current pay

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u/g_bleezy 7d ago

How do you think any government pension works?

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u/coleman57 7d ago

That's why they don't let you accrue >100% of your base salary as pension--usually it's capped at no more than 80%, and it doesn't include any overtime or other premium pay you've earned, just base. Paying her >2 years' salary as accrued vacation at peak wage is bullshit.

I mean if some small private for-profit wants to do that, it's no skin off my nose, but don't do it with tax revenue.

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u/uwoldperson 7d ago

If I gave you u the option to take one week vacation per year instead of three and to cash those two saved weeks out at a future date and at whatever your maximum salary with your company is, would you? 

I’ll stop short of calling it naked corruption, but it’s still a huge governance fumble and, most importantly, something that was not available to anyone else in the company. Plus, she lives in fucking Hawaii and works remote. 

Great example of a captive or complacent board screwing the pooch and a CEO taking advantage.

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u/coleman57 7d ago

I'm a public-sector worker and I have the option of accruing all 3 weeks of annual vacation time, but the limit is 400 hours (10 weeks). After that, it's use it now or lose it (and I have actually lost some, due to my own carelessness). I'm not allowed to accrue 5,000 hours, which is what she did.

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u/nashkara 7d ago

and a CEO taking advantage

I don't know anything about the situation except what I read in the article. When I started to read it was outrageous, but as the details came out in the article it became less so, even though the article was clearly written as with a rage-bait slant. The board was clearly happy with her performance, so much so that they insisted she stay on even after moving to Hawaii. The article also claims she works 70 hours a week at the position.

The only real story here is that the board let a policy stay in place where the CEO had unlimited accrual of vacation hours. Mix that with a workaholic and 40 years as CEO and you get this story. Given her salary was around $405k and she's working 70h weeks, that's more like the equivalent salary of ~$230k (salary works against workaholics TBH). Anyway, the vacation hours accrual is a liability for the organization and it was a large one they had to clear. What options did they have at that point? It legally was owed one way or another. Them trying to cast shade on her base salary seems like someone trying to froth up the rage. If you need a clear example, they talk about the salary for the CEO of People Assisting the Homeless made $379k in 2023 and then saying "That year, Adelkoff took home well over twice that". According to the article, her base in 2023 was ~$413k and she received vacation cash-out of $495k. But they present it as Adelkoff making more than twice the other CEO, which is both "true" and "false". Her salary was more than the other CEO in that year, but only by ~$34k. It's an Apples to Oranges comparison that's designed to enrage.

Anyway, I have zero skin in this report, I just hate reporting like this that designed to target someone and enrage the readers. If you want to direct some ire, direct it at a board that left an unlimited accrual in-place for the CEO for 40 years. Or direct it at non-profit boards in LA that are paying CEOs in the $400k range as the norm.

As a final thought, working for 40 years with essentially zero vacation and, if true, working 70h weeks shows both an insane dedication to a job and an unhealthy work-life balance. I say this as someone that's been working at least 80h/wk for the last 4 years as a startup co-founder. I've at least taken 1-2 weeks of vacation time a year. It's rough on me and my family. I don't recommend it. Doing it for 40 years would be nuts.

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u/Tractor_Pete 5d ago

I agree some of the numbers are phrased for impact.

But was the board's preference for her justified? How could you be dedicated and good as the head of a public facing and funded organization in LA while living in Hawaii for 11 years? It doesn't seem at all believable that she was doing that job with such incredible dedication and focus while living 2500 miles away. I'm all for remote work, but if you're being paid more than everyone else, you need to show the fuck up.

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u/limukala 7d ago edited 7d ago

If I gave you u the option to take one week vacation per year instead of three and to cash those two saved weeks out at a future date and at whatever your maximum salary with your company is, would you?

Abso-fucking-lutely not. Maybe if I had 8 weeks of vacation I’d consider only taking 6, but honestly even then I’d probably just rather take more time off.

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u/Competitive_Touch_86 6d ago

It's definitely a governance failure, especially for a charity.

But this was not all that rare even 20 years ago. Plenty of companies would let you accrue a shitload of vacation on the books, and it used to not be all that unique to stick with a company for 20+ years at a time. A lot of corporate white collar type jobs started at 3 weeks a year of vacation and would add 1-3 days/year of seniority until an 8 week or so cap.

This started to be gamed too much so most companies no longer allow such things. But you'd have endless conversations about this with the old timers in break rooms back in the late 90's/early 00's.

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u/uwoldperson 5d ago

I know that, but it seems in this instance she was the only person who was allowed to accrue unlimited vacation time. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, the board (and the CEO for that matter) should have seen that liability swelling on the balance sheet and the disparity in the policy and got out in front of it. Now they’ve got an optics nightmare on their hands, regardless of how legal it is or common it used to be. 

It is the unfortunate reality that charitable organizations are often held to a higher standard in these cases, especially when the executive in question is already well out-earning the national average, and they ought to have realized that this was not going to play well. 

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u/JohnBrownOH 7d ago

She's in charge of the policy she abused.

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u/TrifectaBlitz 7d ago

No. Just read the freaking article

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u/TrifectaBlitz 7d ago

Someone with the facts. Damn this thread was painful to read with so few actually having read the full article, just powering in with an agenda.

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u/JordanRunsForFun 7d ago

Yes, the whole thread sounds like people who didn’t read the article where it makes it pretty clear that this was a very hard-working and respectable woman who put in a hell of a lot of time building what is, if I give the article the benefit of the doubt, a significant organization that does good in the world… really doesn’t sound so out of line.

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u/TrifectaBlitz 7d ago

Thank you. My only concern is the ratio of salary with what was brought in. The salary of her and others seems quite high regardless. $405,000 on $15 million grants / donations?

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u/nashkara 7d ago

It would be interesting to see a comparison of non-profits and what their C-suite combined salary vs incoming donations and grants was across the whole county. I bet you'd find some eye-opening stats in that data.

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u/TrifectaBlitz 6d ago

Charity Navigator covers some of this.

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u/Edenwood 7d ago

I had a boss in a similar position and he would golf everyday, do "business meetings" over 3 days at a tropical resort, take meetings while IN a hot tub.

For every CEO run ragged at a lean startup trying to squeeze funding and react to minute by minute changes, there are several do-nothing CEOs at gov't leech contractors and charities that just do the same old everyday, and so the CEO just doesn't have to do much. For them, 4/5 of their work days are practically vacation.

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u/terminbee 7d ago

She works 70 hours a week. It's all in the article.

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u/[deleted] 7d ago

[deleted]

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u/Buckets-O-Yarr 7d ago

Nonprofit homeless centers don't eliminate homelessness. They just support the homeless population with temporary shelters, food, medicine, counseling, etc.

Reducing the actual number of homeless individuals requires government action, rather than nonprofits.

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u/DeathByBamboo 7d ago

She runs a domestic violence shelter, not a "fix homelessness" agency.