Gilroy
– Open government,
”
double-dipping
”
by public employees, and the city manager’s proper sphere of
power will be debated by elected officials in the wake of a
retirement deal scandal at City Hall.
Gilroy – Open government, “double-dipping” by public employees, and the city manager’s proper sphere of power will be debated by elected officials in the wake of a retirement deal scandal at City Hall.
The call for the meeting, which is not yet scheduled, comes a week after council held a closed session “performance evaluation” for City Administrator Jay Baksa and City Attorney Linda Callon. The job reviews, in turn, came after several weeks of controversy over Baksa and Callon’s handling of some high-profile retirements.
Baksa brokered a deal in secret that effectively doubled the earning potential of Gilroy’s top two police officials, and Callon’s firm invoked what they called “conservative” legal arguments to bar public scrutiny of the chiefs’ new employment agreements.
Police Chief Gregg Giusiana and Assistant Chief Lanny Brown formally retired earlier this winter and “returned” to work – without any break in service – as part-time employees, putting them in a position to each collect more than $240,000 in pension payments and hourly wages.
In mid-February, a few days after the Dispatch publicized the arrangement, the chiefs volunteered copies of their contracts. In doing so, the chiefs waived confidentiality and rendered the contracts public, city attorneys said. City Hall has since released a prior contract for Giusiana, but attorneys have failed to definitively say if they regard police chief contracts as open records – similar to all other public employee contracts.
“We don’t have a culture that is being built in this city of secrecy or anything like that,” Mayor Al Pinheiro said Monday night.
“It’s not the fact that it’s a conservative approach or liberal approach,” he added. “The direction is: If it’s allowed to be given out, short of putting this city at risk (legally), that is what we want to do.”
Six fellow council members agreed on Pinheiro’s call for a meeting to discuss transparency, as well as the proper roles of council and the city manager, and the thornier issue of public employees who “double dip.” The issue is endemic to the state’s retirement system, with employees retiring from one job and returning to work on a part-time basis to collect what often amounts to two salaries. Although legal, such deals have been criticized as gaming the system and raising costs for all employees and governments who pay into the system.
“There is a business-as-usual take on this thing throughout the state,” Pinheiro said. “It’s not unusual to rehire retired individuals into their specific types of job areas. This city can take an elitist view and say even though it’s legal, we’re not going to participate…(Then) we can pay the top price and not get the expertise on an interim basis that we need.”
Such a policy would also mean passing up huge potential savings. In Gilroy, the deal with the chiefs is saving City Hall more than $100,000 on their medical and pension payments, according to Baksa.
Councilmen and rank-and-file police have voiced less concern about the retirement deals than the failure to disclose the arrangements.
Shortly after the deals became public, Councilman Craig Gartman accused Baksa of violating city charter mandates for council review of new department heads, including police chiefs. Following Baksa’s closed-door job review last week, Gartman tempered his position by saying the charter allows for differing interpretations. He called for a meeting to clarify charter language to delineate the roles of council and the city manager.
While some council members have shied away from micro-managing City Hall, Gartman is not prepared to relinquish the “advise and consent” role.
“The council is here to represent the community as a whole,” he said. “We are to be the check and balance of the bureaucracy, the city government which goes off and does projects and spends money. We’re the watchdogs and it is our job to be a pain in the ass sometimes when reviewing projects or budgets. We’re the oversight committee and it’s our job to do that.”
Such issues are fair game for discussion at the study session, Pinheiro said, though he believes the charter is clear enough. Baksa has routinely informed council of past changes in department heads, and the city has struck similar post-retirement contracts with employees from Gilroy and elsewhere. Baksa said the major distinction in the case of the chiefs, who were kept on to oversee the department’s transition to a new headquarters, is that they had no break in service.
“And that is the tempest in the teapot,” he said. “It would not have happened if it wasn’t for (delays in opening) the police station. They would have retired last year and we would have done the transition while they were still employees. This is a very unique set of circumstances that created this situation, but I welcome the council discussion, because to say the city should not rehire any retired public employees is a reaction. It’s not well thought out. We would be losing enormous capability in these positions.”
