Gilroy
– The city’s top manager will be dragged before city council for
a job review after keeping mum on the retirement of Gilroy’s
highest-ranking police officials.
Gilroy – The city’s top manager will be dragged before city council for a job review after keeping mum on the retirement of Gilroy’s highest-ranking police officials.
In a closed session Monday, the seven-member city council will conduct a “performance evaluation” of City Administrator Jay Baksa, based on his handling of the retirements of Police Chief Gregg Giusiana and Assistant Chief Lanny Brown.
The review comes a few days after the Dispatch reported how a deal negotiated by Baksa – but never disclosed to council or the rank-and-file police officers – allowed the chiefs to formally retire this winter and “return” as part-time employees.
The change in employment status is legal and nearly doubles their earning potential to more than $240,000 in pension payments and hourly wages. And though it saves the city $100,000-plus in retirement and medical payments, some councilmen are questioning why Baksa, who has managed the city for 22 years, failed to disclose the matter.
“We need to be talking about this as a council to find out what the heck is going on with staff, and why council keeps getting left out of the loop,” Councilman Craig Gartman said. “This is only one of a lot of issues.”
Gartman complained last summer of a communications breakdown, when news broke that Westfield Corporation planned to convert 119 acres of east Gilroy farmland into an outdoor shopping mall. Baksa and Mayor Al Pinheiro knew of the deal before it became public, but the rest of council was caught flat-flooted about the biggest mall proposal in Gilroy history.
Though reluctant to micro-manage City Hall, Councilmen Dion Bracco and Russ Valiquette welcomed the idea of a meeting to review Baksa’s responsibilities.
“I think we need to sit down and each voice our opinions about our … expectations of Jay and staff,” Valiquette said.
Bracco said council needs “to be updated on something that could potentially end up in the newspaper.”
Pinheiro has defended Baksa’s actions, saying decisions about hiring and termination fall within his purview as city manager.
“Can we have a conversation now and decide if in the future Jay should handle it differently?” Pinheiro said. “Yes, but right now, by charter, we don’t tell him how to run the city day by day.”
But the retirement deal Baksa struck violates the letter of the law, as spelled out in Section 703(c) of the city charter, Gartman said. The charter calls for council to review changes in department heads, which includes police chiefs.
“He accepted a resignation and he appointed him as an acting chief,” Gartman said. “What you have here is an employment action involving a department head without the consent or knowledge of the council.”
Baksa responded that Gartman is parsing the law too finely, and that while the chiefs are technically retired, they have remained department heads without any break in service.
“I understand there can be differences of opinions,” Baksa said Wednesday, “but here we have a situation that’s saving the city more than $100,000, we’re bringing back two excellent employees to get us through some tough times, and yet it’s somehow perceived as wrong. That’s somewhat amazing to me.”
In a letter to the editor Thursday, Baksa admitted that greater transparency could have helped avoid the flap. Instead, suspicions over the secrecy deepened when the city withheld copies of the chiefs’ post-retirement work agreements.
Legal arguments supporting the decision flout provisions in the Public Records Act, which state such documents must be disclosed without exception, according to Terry Francke, counsel for Californians Aware, a nonprofit open-government advocate.
City Hall released the documents Wednesday after the chiefs volunteered their own copies, but city attorneys continue insisting that contracts of top police brass are exempt from public view – unlike any other public employee contract.
“I’m just amazed that they exacerbated the situation by not releasing the contracts,” said former Mayor Mike Gilroy. “That further pours salt on the wound.”
Had the same situation occurred during his six-year council tenure in the ’90s, Gilroy said he would have expected at least an “informational briefing” from Baksa.
“The fact that the number one and number two persons in public safety retired, to me it’s unbelievable that it would not go before council,” he said.
Another former Gilroy mayor, Santa Clara County Supervisor Don Gage, defended Baksa’s action as a sensible “stopgap” measure, one that saves money and keeps experienced leaders at the helm while police move into a new headquarters.
“If there was a major problem with the police chief, then I would really question the judgment of Jay hiring him back,” Gage said. “But I don’t hear anybody complaining about the chief or Lanny.”
Council members will conduct the performance evaluation following a Feb. 26 meeting that starts at 7pm. The meeting will take place at City Hall, 7351 Rosanna St.
