PD Editorial: CHP payday

<p>At a time when most state employees are facing 15 percent pay cuts in the form of three monthly furlough days, one privileged group of state workers is in line for a pay raise.</p><p>If you guessed state legislators and the governor, you wouldn’t be alone.</p><p>But you would be wrong.</p><p>No, the lucky few are the 7,000 sworn officers of the California Highway Patrol.</p><p>Their labor contract pegs their wages to an annual survey of pay at five of the state’s largest law enforcement agencies: the police departments in Los Angeles, Oakland, San Diego and San Francisco and the sheriff’s department in Los Angeles County.</p><p>This year’s survey mandates a pay raise of “less than 1 percent,” a union official told the Sacramento Bee recently, while declining to be more specific.</p><p>Even at that amount, the California Association of Highway Patrolmen is sensitive to the appearance — though apparently not the fact — of a pay raise when the state is trying to get out from under a $26 billion deficit and other employees (CHP is exempt) are taking furlough days. Union officials told the Bee they are negotiating for the money to show up on paychecks as something other than a pay raise.</p><p>They didn’t say how that might be accomplished. The fact is that money ought to remain in the state general fund to help balance the budget.</p><p>CHP isn’t alone among public agencies with union contracts that peg wages to raises granted elsewhere. Since 2001, the pay of state prison guards has been tied to wages paid by CHP. They, too, would be in line for a raise now, but their contract has expired.</p><p>Salary surveys also are common in local government, including in Santa Rosa, often with the threat of binding arbitration if an agency doesn’t match wages paid elsewhere.</p><p>The typical justification for such arrangements is that police departments and other public agencies will lose employees to agencies that pay more. And perhaps they will — but only until the other agency fills its vacancies.</p><p>No public agency is going to hire every potential employee, nor should any agency base its wage scale on what some other city, county or state agency pays its employees.</p><p>CHP is the only agency that has its automatic pay raises written into state law. Repealing that law would be a good first step.</p><p>The next contract for CHP — and any other group of state or local employees — should tie pay to what the budget will bear, not what the next town over might pay.</p>