By Bil paul
Posted: 09/23/2009 11:26:48 PM PDT
Updated: 09/23/2009 11:26:48 PM PDT
This summer, the San Mateo County Civil Grand Jury released its lengthy report on escalating city employee pay and benefits. It signaled a willingness to tackle a tough, involved, controversial subject. Not everyone was pleased with the report. Some employee unions see it as another attack on employees they represent, especially after there have been layoffs and some employees have agreed to forego contractual pay increases during the recession.
Menlo Park City Council Member Kelly Fergusson in particular lambasted the report, and was quoted as saying that the "grand jury failed miserably. There is just a shocking level of factual errors, and misstatements of facts." Meanwhile, there's a small effort under way to try to remove Fergusson and two other Menlo Park council members from office, and some have said that Fergusson is representing the views of one of the larger employee unions, the powerful Service Employees International Union.
At any rate, it's clear that local city employee pay and benefits including pensions did unreasonably escalate in recent years, especially during the dot-com boom. And now the cities are stuck with their contracts, eating up a massive part of the city budget pie during a deep recession, and during state takeaways of city money.
As a career government employee myself (the U.S. Postal Service), now retired, I certainly know the culture from within. In some instances, government employees are paid less than
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their private-sector counterparts, and oftentimes the reverse is true. What often attracts people to government jobs is greater job security, along with generous health benefits and pensions. Another attraction is being able to serve communities in a direct fashion, such as the fire and police/parole employees do, or the people in social service jobs who help the poor, the disabled and the troubled.
During the dot-com boom, the grand jury report points out, cities had more money, there was binding arbitration of pay disagreements for a time, and there was some competition to get the best employees. So cities often tried to out-bid each other with higher pay and benefit packages. This is questionable in the area of firefighters, for example, since there is always a long waiting list of qualified applicants vying for a small number of openings. However, what can happen is that a fire department, or police department, may spend a lot of money training an employee, giving him or her on-the-job experience and so on, only to eventually lose that employee to another city offering higher pay and benefits, or to the same job in a distant city where the cost of living is less. Similarly in the Postal Service, we had problems with excessive letter carrier turnover in the high-cost-of-living Bay Area due to their being hired here, but then later transferring to cities where the rents or home prices were much lower.
The grand jury report runs over 130 pages, is chock full of tables, and the bulk of it contains the responses of all of San Mateo County's cities. It makes some personnel recommendations to these cities, including:
• Consider a two-tier pay and benefits system so new employees receive less than current employees.
• Small cities, especially, might consider combining departments as a cost savings, eliminating some managerial positions. For example, in one instance, several cities already share a park and recreation department. An IT department could similarly serve more than one city.
• Look at contracting out work to private companies when that would cost less and the work would be of the same quality.
• Consider capping the amount of accumulated sick leave and vacation leave employees can cash out when they retire.
Another area the grand jury looked at is the conflict-of-interest presented when city staffs negotiate new contracts. Usually, when rank-and-file pay raises are given, managers automatically have their salaries bumped up too. In addition, city council members who vote for pay raises can expect union contributions to their re-election efforts. Unions traditionally have been very active in supporting labor-friendly candidates not only with dollar donations, but also with mailers and campaign volunteers. The grand jury suggests that these temptations might be removed by having the public vote yes or no on pay raises.
In one of the responses to the grand jury report, the San Mateo County City Managers Association suggested lobbying the giant state-run pension system to which almost all the Peninsula cities' employees belong (the California Public Employees Retirement System) to extend the minimum retirement age from 50 to 55, or 60 for non-fire and non-police employees, and basing pensions not on one's final salary before retirement, but upon the average salary earned during the last three or five years of work.
I also looked at what the Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury was doing in the area of personnel. The one report in that area prepared by the 2008-2009 group had a rather provocative title: "City of San Jose hosed by IAFF Local 230 executives." The IAFF is the International Association of Fire Fighters. Compared to the San Mateo County report, this was a lightweight investigation, looking at liberties taken by firefighters who also worked as union representatives. The grand jury report concluded that the representatives filed an excessive number of grievances on behalf of their members, used too much paid time off in connection with union activities and failed to document that time, and boycotted meetings designed to improve labor relations. The report noted that the labor-management relationship in the fire department had become toxic and the solution may lie in having fewer union representatives who then work full-time on union business, rather than as part-time firefighters.
If you like keeping up with local government affairs and current hot-button issues, read civil grand jury reports. The grand juries have a degree of independence that makes their viewpoints interesting.
Bil Paul's columns run on Thursdays. Reach him at natural_born_writer@yahoo.com.
http://www.mercurynews.com/peninsula/ci_13407918?nclick_check=1
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