PD Editorial: Slamming the door on the taxpayers

For many government agencies, payroll is the largest expenditure.

Yet taxpayers are usually kept in the dark when salaries and benefits are negotiated, a practice that produced such surprises as retroactive pension increases.

And a cynical measure now pending in the state Legislature aims to keep the closed doors closed tight.

Senate Bill 331, dubbed the Civic Reporting Openness in Negotiations Efficiency Act, is backed by public employee unions and touted as a government transparency measure.

As regular readers of these pages know, we are strong proponents of open government and unhindered access to public records.

But this bill, by state Sen. Tony Mendoza, D-Artesia, isn’t really about open government. It would instead create costly requirements and needless delays for public services - and apply those rules only to those jurisdictions that try to lift the shroud of secrecy from labor negotiations.

If this was really going to promote transparency and save money, shouldn’t it apply to all cities, counties and special districts?

The primary targets are Orange County, the city of Costa Mesa, the East Bay Municipal Utility District and a handful of other cities that have one thing in common: They adopted local laws promoting openness, independence and public scrutiny in collective bargaining.

The ordinances, dubbed Civic Openness in Negotiations, or COIN, require an independent negotiator for labor contracts, public disclosure of formal offers and counter-offers and more detailed financial analysis of proposed agreements. They also require a 30-day review period before city councils, county supervisors or special district boards vote on labor contracts.

In most jurisdictions, contract negotiations take place in secret and elected officials formulate offers and counter-offers in executive session, which is allowed by exemptions in the state’s open-meeting law. As a result, the public seldom gets more than the legal minimum of 72 hours’ notice before a final vote.

Some cities and counties use independent negotiators, others send management employees to the table, creating a potential conflict as they are likely to be given raises and benefit increases at least equal to those received by rank-and-file employees.

SB 331, which is pending in an Assembly committee, would impose a 30-day review, mandate an independent audit report and establish added disclosure rules for any government contract worth more than $50,000 - but only in jurisdictions that enact COIN ordinances. And, of course, those requirements would be suspended if the COIN ordinance was repealed.

A Senate Governance and Finance Committee analysis identified the major flaw in SB 331, noting that the details of service and supply contracts are published in advance and that those contracts are awarded through public bidding in contrast to the closed-door process for negotiating labor contracts. Unfortunately, that wasn’t enough to stop senators from moving the bill out of committee and the full Senate.

The Assembly should kill this bill, and Sonoma County and local cities should consider COIN ordinances or other policies to allow more public oversight of labor contracts.

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Editor’s Note: Based on information in a state Senate Committee analysis, the original version of this editorial incorrectly listed the East Bay Municipal Utilities District among jurisdictions with ordinances requiring additional public disclosures regarding collective bargaining. The story above has been edited to reflect this correction.