By Michael Moore
Staff writer
In response to a growing outcry over salaries and benefits to
public employees, which have steadily increased in the past few
years, the city of Morgan Hill launched a page on its website
listing the information for all of its employees.
Publicizing the information is a way to let the public know that
the city has nothing to hide, City Manager Ed Tewes said. The
outreach effort follows recent revelations that the city of Bell
had paid its city manager about $787,000 per year, plus a new focus
among taxpayers on salaries for public employees since the current
recession began.
By Michael Moore
Staff writer
In response to a growing outcry over salaries and benefits to public employees, which have steadily increased in the past few years, the city of Morgan Hill launched a page on its website listing the information for all of its employees.
Publicizing the information is a way to let the public know that the city has nothing to hide, City Manager Ed Tewes said. The outreach effort follows recent revelations that the city of Bell had paid its city manager about $787,000 per year, plus a new focus among taxpayers on salaries for public employees since the current recession began.
“To meet the needs of the community, it is important that we have their trust and confidence, and that translates into openness and transparency,” Tewes said. “We thought it best to get this information out in a proactive way.”
The page was posted last week, at www.morgan-hill.ca.gov, listed under the “what’s new” tab. A downloadable spreadsheet lists the regular and overtime wages, as well as expense allowances, leave payouts and a portion of benefits compensation paid to 202 city employees in 2009.
Those employees were paid about $20.6 million last year – about 77 percent of which was paid as regular wages.
The city’s highest-paid employee in 2009 was Tewes, who made about $273,500, including a $6,200 auto allowance and a $9,346 housing allowance. Following the city manager in compensation were City Attorney Danny Wan and Police Chief Bruce Cumming, who were paid about $202,000 each.
The city manager and city attorney work under individual contracts with the city, which set the terms of payments for health insurance, retirement benefits and all other forms of compensation.
Also listed are overtime costs, which for some employees climbed higher than $30,000 in 2009. Most of the overtime costs came from the police department. That’s because police services are required around-the-clock, and officers don’t always get to go home as soon as their shift is scheduled to end, according to Cmdr. Joe Sampson.
“When you have a small staff and lots of events that occur, as a police department we have to be there,” Sampson said. “When people call 911, they expect an officer to be there, and there are some events that require hours and hours of police work.”
Still, the department has reduced its overtime budget in the past three years. One way it has done so is by providing in-house training, rather than by sending them outside the community which requires travel expenses, Sampson said.
The city is also preparing a response to a Santa Clara County Civil Grand Jury report released in May, entitled “Cities must rein in unsustainable employee costs.” The report says compensation and benefits to employees in all 15 cities in the county have increased – in some cases drastically – in the past 10 years.
The report says there is “widespread concern that the cost of employee total compensation continues to increase while revenues and services decrease.” It notes that while public salaries and benefits went up in response to flourishing times in the first half of the decade, elected and appointed officials did not forecast the possibility of a downturn such as what is happening now, and did not prepare alternate plans in case revenues went south.
In that report, Morgan Hill’s median total compensation, including wages and all benefits, for a nonpublic safety employee was about $104,000 as of last year – higher than only three other cities in the county. The median compensation for police in Morgan Hill was about $161,000 last year – also higher than only three other cities in the county.
In Gilroy, the median compensation for nonpublic safety employees was about $86,000, while for public safety employees – including firefighters – it was about $156,000. The city of Morgan Hill contracts with the Santa Clara County Fire District for fire and EMS services, and their wages are not included in the figures. The city pays about
$5.4 million per year for those services.
Most cities listed in the report increased their average employee compensation drastically since 2000 – in some cases by more than 40 percent, according to the report. Morgan Hill’s personnel cost data was not available in 2000 in the form that that grand jury requested it, Tewes said.
“It is our experience that Morgan Hill’s compensation levels – all the way up and down the organization – (are) at or slightly below the median,” Tewes said. “We’re generally in the bottom half (in Santa Clara County). Our goal is to be in the middle of the pack.”
The city council Wednesday approved a lengthy response to the grand jury report, which listed a dozen findings and recommendations to the cities to control the cost of labor. One of the city council’s top goals in the past two years has been to reduce the overall cost of labor, primarily due to declining revenues from sales, property and hotel taxes.
But mayoral candidate and former city finance director Art College said the city is not being open or efficient enough. He said city officials should publish more information about “the various activities they do,”
but he did not specify.
Plus, he said the city should “get serious” with the labor unions, and speed up the process of negotiations that reduce taxpayers’ expenses while still keeping the employees here.
“I don’t see that happening rapidly enough, especially when taxpayers are losing their retirement and their savings,” College said.
The compensation figures listed on the city’s website – about 60 percent of which are paid with general fund tax dollars – were lower than projected. Tewes said at the end of most years, salaries and benefits end up “considerably lower” than what was budgeted.
And while the budget for employee compensation this year is about $24.2 million, that includes some labor costs that are not posted online, Tewes said. Specifically, the lump sums of unemployment and workers compensation insurance, and the employees’ share of Medicare taxes, are not included in the 2009 figures.
Also not included are the city’s costs of police and “miscellaneous”
employees’ retirement plans. The city pays for those costs based on state requirements, and contracts with individual employees and the three labor unions that represent most city employees.
In 2009, the city paid 13 percent of the salaries of miscellaneous employees (such as public works, recreation and parks staff) into retirement accounts, Tewes said. The same year, the city paid 27 percent of police salaries into retirement plans.
Neither of these payments are factored into the data listed on the city’s website.
“Compensation is distinct from the cost to the city of having that individual on board,” Tewes said.
Mayor Steve Tate praised the city manager’s decision to post the compensation information.
“The whole thing with Bell makes everybody suspicious of every public entity in the state,” Tate said. “Getting the information out there so everybody can see it as a giant step toward saying, ‘Not us.'”
