Gilroy
– The city’s elected leaders will not limit the powers of City
Hall’s top manager following a scandal sparked by his handling of
two high-profile retirements.
Gilroy – The city’s elected leaders will not limit the powers of City Hall’s top manager following a scandal sparked by his handling of two high-profile retirements.
At an informal policy discussion Thursday, however, council took a step toward increasing City Hall’s transparency by calling for city attorneys to compile a detailed list of records open for public inspection, a move lauded by one of the state’s leading open government advocates. On the same night, officials laid to rest the issue of so-called “double-dipping” – when public employees retire and resume work so they can collect pension and part-time wages.
All three issues came into the spotlight in the last two months as a result of retirement deals City Administrator Jay Baksa negotiated with Police Chief Gregg Giusiana and Assistant Chief Lanny Brown. Both chiefs quietly retired as full-time employees earlier this winter and “returned” to work without a break in service – a prelude to permanent departures from active duty. The change in employment status puts them in a position to double their earnings and could save the city $100,000-plus in benefit payments. The deals have been less controversial than Baksa’s failure to inform city council or rank-and-file police.
“It wasn’t the issue of the retirements. It was the notification,” Baksa said Thursday, a few weeks after council reviewed his and the city attorney’s job performance in the wake of the scandal. “I’ve always said that having gone through this experience, I certainly would have done it differently.”
Council members agreed on Baksa’s call for a standard requiring him and future city administrators to immediately inform council when police chiefs and other department heads change employment status. Councilmen stopped short, however, of demanding greater involvement in Baksa’s powers to hire and fire city employees. The decision came after Baksa explained the dangers of politicizing staff positions and outlined the extensive interview process candidates face for managerial positions.
“The consent is there to be a check and balance,” Councilman Russ Valiquette said, “but if your peer review is part of the process, you can leave out the council’s consent. If you’re telling us this is the best candidate (for a job), what do you need us for? Do we need this in the charter?”
Mayor Al Pinheiro did not call for removing charter language that requires council consent on new hires, but Friday he called the responsibility a “formality” that involves “reviewing a resume for 10 minutes.” The consent role dates back to the original charter language approved in 1960, a time when nepotism and political favoritism were a fact of life in the culture of local governments, councilmen said.
“That’s how it was done back then,” Pinheiro said. “Now we have all these layers (of review).”
But not every councilmen is comfortable abdicating the consent role, or even relegating it to a rubber stamp.
“Council’s job is to represent the interest of the community and make sure the bureaucracy that we call staff is responsible to the city,” Councilman Craig Gartman said Friday. “And if any one of us wish to cast aside our responsibility to check that employees are doing their job correctly, then that’s their decision. Then it’s up to the voters to decide next election if they want people who will cast aside their responsibilities as a check and balance.”
City Attorney Linda Callon urged council to leave the charter language in tact in response to Valiquette’s questioning of the consent role. Any charter revisions must be ratified at the voting booths by Gilroy residents. Officials agreed to begin reviewing the charter for possible revisions in January 2008, following the fall council election.
Double Dipping
Officials also declined to rewrite city regulations to limit the hiring of former public employees who are already collecting pensions. The practice is common in California and Baksa warned that turning away such candidates could rob the city of vital experience. In addition to the two police chiefs, the city’s current interim superintendent of schools and its fire chief are collecting state pensions from previous jobs.
Valiquette tried to head off the entire debate Thursday night.
“To me double-dipping is a non-issue,” he said. “It’s one of the most ridiculous things brought up during this whole thing.”
Councilman Dion Bracco said that “as long as we have the best employees working for the city, I don’t care.”
The hiring of retirees will become a crucial path to retaining institutional knowledge as a generation of baby boomers starts leaving work, Baksa said. On Friday, he said the true problem with the California Public Employment Retirement System is not the hiring of retirees, but the decision of state officials to gradually lower retirement ages while increasing benefits.
Twenty years ago, the typical police officer could only retire at age 60 and collect 2 percent of his highest wage for every year of employment. By about 2000, the CalPERS system had evolved to the point where public safety employees could retire as early as age 50 and collect 3 percent of their highest wage for every year worked. More people collecting bigger pensions at an earlier age translates to a greater strain on the overall pension system, Baksa said.
Pinheiro said that “the people you need to be talking to if there is a need to fix this are the ones in Sacramento.”
Transparency
Not a single resident was there to see it, but city officials took an important step Thursday night toward increasing transparency at City Hall, according to Terry Francke, general counsel for nonprofit Californians Aware.
Officials called on their attorneys to itemize records held by the city and to distribute handouts to employees noting which records are public and which are confidential, Gartman said.
“I wish everyone did that,” Francke said. “In fact, it’s something we encourage in our training sessions for agencies. What we suggest is actually a three-option list … We suggest they have a list of documents that are always public – no questions asked, no hesitation. Then a list of documents that are never going to be public, because disclosure is prohibited. And then there’s a middle ground of documents that are presumed public, but where the actual access may depend on the circumstances or particulars.”
The latter category has been the source of recent records battles between the Dispatch and City Hall. In the case of the police chiefs, for instance, city attorneys determined that case law exempted the chiefs’ employment contracts from public scrutiny. Francke and other open government advocates called the opinion a violation of state statutes that departed from common practice at dozens of other law enforcement agencies across the state. Officials eventually released the documents after the chiefs volunteered copies, but city attorneys have never clarified whether they regard employment contracts of law enforcement officials to be public records.
“Our first thought is, ‘Hey, let’s give it out unless it’s shown that legally we can’t do it,’ ” Pinheiro said, adding that, “We must go through an internal evaluation to make sure somebody doesn’t give it out without validating that the information can be given out. At times that might mean you ask for something but it has to have the eyes of legal counsel look over it. Our intention is to do it as fast as we can.”
The list of records should speed the processing of records requests, Francke said, adding that for each record deemed confidential, the city should include citations of statutes and case law that bar disclosure.
“If this is done properly, every type of information in those three categories will be annotated so people can check it out for themselves,” Francke said. “If the city says access is prohibited, then people can go look it up themselves. That’s a safeguard against the agency misclassifying something.”
