How Sacramento politicians snuck hefty pay raises and vacation bumps by the public | Opinion
Sacramento City Hall gave itself some pretty hefty raises the other night. By the time the deed was done after more than four hours of meetings on other topics, hardly anyone in the City Council chambers was there.
City employees are getting 6% raises this year (the bump is retroactive for police back to March, others in the rank and file to September). In a matter of a few minutes without a peep of debate, the Council added $24 million to its budget burden next year.
Opinion
To put that in perspective, these raises for city employees will amount to five times the money that the city is obligated on the homeless based on Measure O passed by voters in 2022. And the city only has to pay $5 million toward the homeless if general funds are “unobligated.” The city just obligated $24 million more on its own pay.
The police based on its new contract will get at least a 4% raise next year, others 4% as well.
And with Sacramento’s public employee unions satisfied, they were nowhere to be found when it came time to give the city’s charter officers a 5% raise, and on top of that, 10 weeks vacation for City Manager Howard Chan.
In a delicious turn of events, it turns out that some dogged reporting by the Bee’s Theresa Clift unearthed that the late-evening vote on Chan and the Charter officer compensation was downright illegal.
The employees deserve a raise. But the public also deserves a city leadership that won’t go to great lengths to minimize public input. Chan deployed tactics from the government playbook on how to jack up pay at City Hall with barely a peep of protest.
Taking advantage of the holidays
The council’s Dec. 12 meeting was the Council’s last of the year. It was less than two weeks before Christmas. It was in the middle of Hanukkah. The Sacramento Kings were playing the Los Angeles Clippers that night. The council calendar was safely crowded, and community attention was well diverted.
But this is just the first trick. The second was that before the hastily called “special meeting,” where city employees got their big raises. It was a meeting called by Chan barely over 24 hours in advance. The regularly scheduled meeting that preceded it was full of other contentious topics.
Bring out the dogs
Sacramento has long faced the question of where to build a new permanent dog park, either in Curtis Park or Land Park, two traditional hotbeds of civic engagement. An 11-month dog park experiment at the Sierra 2 Park in Curtis Park ended earlier this year. After an outreach process, the city staff proposed to serve both communities with a new dog park within William Land Park.
The public comment period attracted 19 speakers. What was slated as a consent calendar item went on for nearly an hour.
Curtis Park lost in the debate, by the way. Land Park gets the dog park. But by now, the meeting that started at 5 o’clock was approaching 6:30.
Bring out the youth
The City Council for years has not resolved whether young Sacramentans should serve in some capacity on the city’s various boards and commissions, or even on the council itself. That was the dream of former council member Jay Schenirer, who left the council in 2022.
Previous meetings had revealed a divided council. The debate was destined to be long. And, coincidentally, the city placed the matter on the Dec. 12 agenda for the fight.
Council members Lisa Kaplan and Karina Talamantes, previous school board members themselves, preferred young adults participating on all the city’s boards and commissions. Mayor Pro Tem Mai Vang prioritized a youth, age 16 or 17, participating on the council itself as a non-voting member. The council as a committee last debated the issue in September. It didn’t get to the full council until Dec. 12.
As could be expected, youth activists and their supporters descended on the chambers en masse. Thirty-three members of the public signed up to speak. One council member or another spoke more than 30 times. The Kaplan-Talamantes proposal prevailed in a nail-biter, five votes to four.
The matter took nearly two hours.
After 25 minutes of public comments on items not on the agenda, the meeting at 9:08 p.m. was finally over.
Save the raises for last
After the meeting was over and a 16-minute recess, there was yet another meeting. That “special” meeting called by Chan barely over 24 hours in advance. It was agendized to start at 6 p.m. By now, the chambers were all but empty as the council voted on the raises for city staff.
Suddenly the council was speechless. None commented on the raises themselves. Only Mayor Darrell Steinberg had something to say. He had a last-minute change of mind about the wisdom of granting Chan 10 weeks of vacation.
“For me, it is an ask that I am uncomfortable with,” he said. He, along with Vang and Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela abstained on the vote for the charter officer raises. The remaining six voted yes.
The challenge of managing the additional $24 million burden to a city already facing a structural deficit is left to the new year. After the 17-minute special meeting, the matter appeared to be over.
But it was not.
It turns out that Chan was just a little too clever calling a special meeting on such short notice to increase his pay. It turns out that state law prohibits that. The Brown Act, which sets the rules for public meetings in California, clearly states: “A legislative body shall not call a special meeting regarding the salaries, salary schedules, or compensation paid in the form of fringe benefits, of a local agency executive.”
Chan can’t start taking that extra vacation — or cashing it in — just yet. The item has been rescheduled for the council’s Jan. 9 meeting.
The city manager has so humiliated this council by jamming his special pay package down its throat, and then doing so illegally, it is unspeakable why any council member would think that a special compensation bump at this point is somehow appropriate.
If Chan ever tried seriously to hold the line on employee costs, he would have to lead by example. He is not. And this is why the council wants to keep Chan as the highest paid city manager in California?
The majority of this council on Dec. 12 seemed comfortable to go along for the ride, with as few paying attention as possible. But the tactic has now backfired.
On Jan. 9, Chan’s pay item should have its own hearing early in the evening. If council members Sean Loloee (if he is still on the council), Eric Guerra, Rick Jennings, Caity Maples, Kaplan and Talamantes still want to reward Chan extra vacation time for handling executive compensation matters so badly, heaven help Sacramento.
