At several different points of time, the City of Davis has talked about becoming more transparent in its dealings. The city has always complied fully with requests for information about employee salaries.
Toward that end, other cities have taken the lead in making information more transparent.
The California City News reported earlier this week that the city of Costa Mesa has released the most “extensive and comprehensive compensation report that accounts for the base pay, overtime, health benefits and pension costs of all 572 current and former full- and part-time employees at City Hall.”
They have posted this information in the form of a 27-page document on their city website under the transparency section (click here if you want to see the type of information that has been disclosed).
Open government advocates are praising the release of this information and the amount of transparency and access it grants the public to the workings of their own government.
According to the local paper, “The report is a revamped version of an older 2010 compensation listing that the city had posted online, and draws on the same data. The new version explains what each category means, clearly delineates pay from pension costs, and even shows how city workers are compensated through special provisions like a car allowance.”
“If someone for the first time looked at both of those reports, we think it’d be easier for the general public to understand what’s occurring, based on the new format,” city Chief Executive Tom Hatch to the Daily Pilot.
Of course, not everyone is happy with this release of information.
The City News reports that a number of labor groups, such as the Orange County Employees Association, claim that it represents an inaccurate picture of compensation.
Apparently, there is concession information that is missing from the data. A spokesperson, Jennifer Muir said, “If the city thinks this is irrelevant, then just ask the employees and their families who are making these significant contributions paycheck after paycheck.”
Ms. Muir, according to the City News, “was also critical of the fact that employees did not have the option of keeping their names confidential in the report because they were not notified it would be released.”
The city has defended listing names as the public’s right to know.
I would consider the City of Davis to have mixed reviews in terms of its transparency. On the one hand, the Vanguard gives the city high marks for the amount of cooperation that it has given in the release of public documents.
We have had few problems obtaining the records we want and that we believe are available, in a timely fashion. The few disputes that we have had have necessarily encompassed gray areas over which the city did not have full control.
For instance, the Vanguard took the City of Davis to court over an email communication in 2007 from Judge Rosenberg to the Davis City Council over an individual he was lobbying to become the next police chief. The City denied the request, based on it being a personnel record. The Vanguard disagreed, arguing that such communication was disclosable as the City Council was not even the decision-making party on the hire.
In the end, the court sided with the city and the Vanguard decided, given the length and expense of the process, to drop the matter late in 2008, nearly two years after the date of the request.
However, at the same time, the Vanguard is critical that a number of steps that the council and city have promised to undertake in the name of transparency, and also record retention, have seemed to have gone by the wayside.
For instance for several years, the city has known about a problem with record retention in the form of the past city council meetings. Back in 2009, the council directed staff multiple times to find ways to retain the video from past council meetings.
The city stores these videos for a limited time on their website. Moreover, requests for videos only go back six months and the library maintains them only for two years.
After that, the only record of meetings from the past is stored either in old newspaper articles – which are inconsistent over time and often lack critical details – or minutes which, while inclusive, are limited in the amount of detail of discussions.
Moreover, as we have noted on many occasions, the city still operates as though it were 1995 or 2000 when it comes to communicating with the public. The website is still very basic. The city does not take advantage of social media to communicate with the public. They have not built an extensive email list to communicate directly to the public.
The city still engages in expensive snail mail communications to a select group of people on key issues such as development and public outreach.
We hope that Steve Pinkerton, with his extensive use of Twitter and blogs, will revamp the city’s communications system.
However, the more serious issue is that of having readily available information on the website about key issues. Cities like Costa Mesa would appear to be way ahead of Davis in this regard, and other cities have sunshine acts that expand on state mandate disclosure.
The city must recognize that the Brown Act and Public Records Act, which demand open government and transparency, are in fact the floor on such issues. We need a document that lays out our commitment to such principles.
The Vanguard therefore calls on the Davis City Council to do several things: First, follow suit and post salary data on their website just as the City of Costa Mesa has. Second, implement a policy to preserve the videos of all council meetings and store them electronically in a way that can be burned onto a disc and given to a member of the public.
Third, the city needs to draft its own Sunshine Act. There are many examples from other communities. We are a general law city, of course, but there is nothing in the Brown Act or the PRA to preclude more stringent requirements.
Fourth, the city needs to revamp its communications system and develop email lists and social networking tools to better communicate with the public in the second decade of the 21st Century.
Fifth, the city needs to develop a policy whereby the public is kept in the loop on the progress of collective bargaining. This is an issue that was raised first two years ago during the last round. We feared at the time that MOUs would not be released until the time of their agreement, and be, in fact, done deals. That is precisely what happened.
The school district posts periodic updates on the progress of their bargaining on their website. Other cities have found ways to do likewise. Obviously, we do not want to break laws or undermine confidences, but the more transparent the process becomes, the more we can monitor and keep our elected representatives on the city council on track.
From this perspective, we are excited that Mr. Pinkerton has come on board, and hope that he will help the council to develop new and exciting ways to increase city transparency.
—David M. Greenwald reporting
Your “click here” link does not appear to work…
It just worked for me. Anyone else having problems?
Works now… I may have had a ‘gremlin’…
This info is exactly what was needed in the latest bru ha ha (?) about Mr Pinkerton’s hire since it gives many subtotals and then the total total.
But their salaries seem quite high. Any idea how Costa Mesa is faring in these economic times? I know they have quite a bit of industry and tax revenue.
[quote]The Vanguard therefore calls on the Davis City Council to do several things: First, follow suit and post salary data on their website just as the City of Costa Mesa has. Second, implement a policy to preserve the videos of all council meetings and store them electronically in a way that can be burned onto a disc and given to a member of the public.
Third, the city needs to draft its own Sunshine Act. There are many examples from other communities. We are a general law city, of course, but there is nothing in the Brown Act or the PRA to preclude more stringent requirements.
Fourth, the city needs to revamp its communications system and develop email lists and social networking tools to better communicate with the public in the second decade of the 21st Century.[/quote]
1. Posting salary data is fine, but I personally think individual names should be redacted.
2. I like the idea of preserving actual footage of CC meetings. But would like to know the expense of such a suggestion before advocating for CDs of archived CC meetings.
3. Not sure what you mean by Davis devising its own “Sunshine Act”. What do you want in it that is not already in the Brown Act/PRA?
4. I don’t do Facebook and Twitter, so I don’t particularly see this as critical for the City to do. But I could be convinced otherwise if there was enough evidence to support its importance. Again, cost?
[i]” Posting salary data is fine, but I personally think individual names should be redacted.”[/i]
I disagree when it is a high-paid job in the public sector. Below some level of compensation I would be fine if the disclosure was by role.
Today, you can see the compensation of every executive and every person with gross compensation of $100,000 or more for every non-profit. There are accounting and entity/governance tricks used by the larger companies to hide some of this, but it is required by law that salary information be made available to the public. Given this, we should demand the same for all public-sector jobs.
ERM: [i]Posting salary data is fine, but I personally think individual names should be redacted. [/i]
Absolutely. No exceptions.
Somehow this got posted on the other story (most likely me);
Given that salaries are already a matter of public record its seems clear to me that these salaries ought to be available and possibly posted online. There is some staff time/expense involved here but it should not be too high given that human resources has these records anyway.
Archiving old CC meetings also should be easy. The costs of data storage has dropped dramatically and I find it hard to believe that this would be a big expense. Its all to easy to forget what people said. Personally, I don’t think this archive should be used for gottcha moments where a CC members says something they may later regret–but as a record of a debate in the past it would be useful.
[quote]this archive should be used for gottcha moments where a [b]CC members[/b] says something they may later regret[/quote]But, it would still be OK to “gotcha” city staff, right?
My apologies…. I didn’t capture all of Dr Wu’s quote… she said it was NOT good to use the archives to “gotcha” CC memeber… my question remains, however…
ELAINE: [i]”Posting salary data is fine, but I personally think individual names should be redacted.”[/i]
JEFF: [i]”I disagree when it is a high-paid job in the public sector. Below some level of compensation I would be fine if the disclosure was by role.”[/i]
My own view is that [b]the only individual names[/b] which should be listed along with their job titles and incomes should be the top executives: the city manager, the city attorney, the assistant city manager, the city clerk, the human resources director, the department heads (including the police and fire chiefs) and any others whose annual total comp is as high or higher those top execs (i.e., those with a total comp in the $200,000 and more range).
When total compensation is listed for each position, it should include everything, both on a monthly and yearly* basis. It is wildly misleading to simply list salary or even salary plus medical benefits. Total comp is a much longer, much more costly list in Davis:
Salary for weeks worked, salary for vacation weeks, salary for paid holidays, salary for management leave, overtime paid by the City, overtime paid by the State, medical + dental benefit used, cafeteria cashout, vacation cashout, management leave cashout, sick leave cashout**, pension funding for employee share, pension funding for employer share, life insurance, long-term disability insurance, Medicare, worker’s comp, and survivor’s benefit.
After a column which totals that amount for each job title, an additional column should report the amount of unfunded retiree medical is being accrued for the period. For most employees, this is roughly $15,000 to $20,000 per year more in compensation which goes unreported.
*The reason to include a monthly and a yearly basis is because while yearly is a number that most people can relate to, some employees change positions or leave within the year’s time frame, and thus showing monthly data for individual jobs clarifieds the difference.
**AFAIK, not all City employees can cashout their unused sick leave. The police, I know, can. Most others, I believe, cannot cashout sick leave but can collect service time for any accumulated unused sick leave. cashout is governed by state law.
It depends on the bargaining group how much sick leave workers are granted: the firefighters get 11.5 hours of sick leave for every month worked; I think everyone else gets 8 hours for each calendar month of service.
If you take a misc. employee who worked 30 years (or 360 months) for the City of Davis, he will likely add at least 1 year to his “service time” by accumulating unused sick leave. Over 30 years he is credited with 2,880 hours (360 x 8) of sick leave. Say he used 800 hours of sick leave and banked 2,080 hours. Divide 2,080 by 40 (hours/week) and you get 52 weeks of “service time.” So his pension, instead of starting at 75% of the average of his last 3 years of salary, it will start at 77.5% of that.
At 40 hours a week, that will add 72 weeks to his service time. I’m not sure if PERS credits partial years. If they don’t then that adds 1 year to his service time.