How many employees is your California city paying? This interactive database tells you

COLUMN: Some cities offer more workers than you’d imagine; others, a lot fewer. See how yours ranks among 469 California burgs.

California’s weirdest and most supremely staffed city — the extremely industrial Vernon — had one city worker for every 0.8 residents.

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At the far other end of the spectrum, California’s most soberly-staffed city — Orange County’s own Laguna Woods — had one worker for every 1,322 residents.

Our latest fun with city data, sure to endear us even further to official types who are still sore about our pension-payments-as-percent-of-general-fund analysis, paints an interesting picture of the service levels you might expect at your local city hall. But it’s complicated, of course.

A city like Vernon is, literally, built for business. It has just a couple of hundred residents, who earn about $71,000 a year and have a median age of 28, according to our pals at the U.S. Census Bureau. Vernon has its own (expensive) police and fire departments, and city staffers primarily serve the needs of its business community.

Laguna Woods, in contrast, is a quieter community of more than 17,000, where the median age is 75 and the median income is about $60,000. It’s what’s known, in government-speak, as a “contract city,” meaning it buys police, fire and other services from other governments and companies, so it doesn’t carry those employees (or their salaries and pensions) on its own books. Contract cities are generally thriftier, but their service levels can still be quite stellar, even if they appear at the bottom of lists like this one.

So there are lots of layers here, but we still find the analysis most interesting. We’ve lived in one of California’s largest cities — with one worker for every 105 or so residents — and getting help could be a battle. We’ve also lived in one of California’s smallest cities — one worker for every 41 or so residents — and, really, it’s way different. A smaller city with more workers per resident to help is, we dare say, a far more pleasant experience.

Click here to read the full article in the OC Register