Editorial: Pay Survey Insight
Want to know why the state of California is in financial trouble? Consider the response The Reporter received this spring to its request for pay and benefit information from the Bay Conservation and Development Commission, of which Solano County is a part.
Rather than a providing a spreadsheet or a written list containing all of the pay and benefit information requested — as nearly every other agency was able to do — Executive Director Will Travis provided links to websites that listed the names of managers and board members and salary ranges posted by the State Personnel Board.
He said he was unable to tell us how much BCDC spends on retirement, health, dental and vision benefits or life insurance and long-term disability premiums for top managers. That’s because the commission is a state agency, so all of those benefits “are set by the Public Employees Retirement System,” Director Travis wrote. “The premiums paid depend on the coverage and insurer selected by individual employees. we do not have the resources to undertake research to provide you with this information for each of our employees. If you want to undertake the research yourself, the data are probably available from the State Controller’s Office.”
In other words, he doesn’t have any idea how much his agency is spending to employee individual managers.
That’s been a recurring theme through the decades, as The Reporter has attempted take a snapshot look at what it costs taxpayers to staff the upper echelons of public agencies in and around Solano County.
Sure, the folks in charge may know how much they are spending to run the entire agency, but some can’t — or won’t — tell what that means in terms of individual pay packages.
Yet most taxpayers can’t get their heads around million-dollar budgets. show them how it breaks down for an individual salary package, though, and they begin to grasp the true costs and how it compares to what their own employers are spending.
Unfortunately, the BCDC isn’t the only agency that couldn’t break down the numbers this year. between a new computer program that changes the way information can be retrieved and a shortage of personnel to look up information the old-fashioned way, the Fairfield-Suisun Unified School District was unable to provide figures for anything more than base salary, “other in-lieu salary” and “all other benefits.” this means The Reporter is no longer able to compare health or retirement benefits from year to year, or even just check for addition errors or make sure the school district has included all of the information requested — a distressingly common error among even the most cooperative agencies.
Meanwhile, the city of Rio Vista is missing completely from this year’s survey. Repeated requests for the information went unheeded, as the finance director purportedly was “dedicating his time to the audit and budget.”
The Rio Vista Montezuma Cemetery District didn’t even bother to offer an excuse. They simply didn’t respond at all.
In both cases, The Reporter is determined to get the information, and when it arrives, it will be published.
The Reporter’s not ready to give up its survey, which attempts to show exactly what the public is paying to employ its top public managers.
Why just the top folks? Space limitations, for one reason. there just isn’t enough newsprint to publish every public employee’s salary and benefit information.
While websites, such as the one established this year by State Controller John Chiang, are able to detail that information for every employee, they make no attempt to analyze the data, to see the changes from year to year or agency to agency. by focusing on a smaller data set, The Reporter tries to keep an eye on those changes.
Another reason for looking at the top managers’ pay and benefits is that while individual employees may, at times, take home fatter paychecks than their bosses — usually because they are paid overtime and managers aren’t — those at the top of the chain of command are usually the best compensated, especially when it comes to perks. It’s a good bet that all of the benefits offered by a public agency are included in a manager’s pay package.
Fortunately, for Reporter readers, the vast majority of public agencies here are accustomed to providing pay and benefit information — something they’ve done long before the shenanigans by the city manager and city council in Bell, Calif., put public employee pay in the spotlight last year.
Even regional agencies new to the survey this year were able to thoroughly explain how their managers and board members are compensated. “Our intent is to be transparent to the public,” is how Herbert Pike, director of finance for the Association of Bay Area Governments,” put it.
That’s the right spirit — one that state-run agencies would do well to adopt.
