Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Senate Bill 190, which requires the University of California Board of Regents and the California State University to open meetings on employee compensation and long-term planning to the public, into law Friday.
The bill was sponsored by State Sen. Leland Yee in February in response to growing concerns that UC operations were exclusionary and rarely open to the public, said Adam Keigwin, spokesman for Yee.
SB 190 was similar to a bill Yee introduced early last year that eventually failed in the state appropriations committee, Keigwin said.
William Schlitz, a spokesman for the American Federation of State Municipal Employees local 3299, the union division that represents 20,000 UC employees, said the earlier bill failed because some legislators felt cost was a prohibitive factor in mandating greater transparency in UC operations.
The recently passed bill is not significantly different from the bill proposed by Yee last year, Keigwin said, except that it encompasses both the UC and the CSU.
Also, the earlier bill would have required all UC executive compensation and long-term planning meetings to be public.
The one exception to the new policy on public meetings is that the UC can interview and court prospective employees privately, Keigwin said.
Potential employees may not want their current employers to know they are interviewing for a new job, Keigwin said, and allowing for such meetings to happen privately would protect a prospective employee’s interests.
“In some ways it’s strengthened, and in other ways it protects prospective candidates’ privacy,” he said.
In light of the ongoing criticisms that the UC is overly secretive with regards to executive compensation, the UC began to make changes in its infrastructure and administrative policy as early as April 2007.
“This legislation aligns with and supports the practice we put in place last year where all compensation for senior managers is approved in public. Consistent with open meeting laws, discussions about individual compensation may still occur in private since they often involve performance-related matters,” said Paul Schwartz, a UC spokesman, in a brief e-mail.
While some agree that UC efforts to increase transparency have been steps in the right direction, Keigwin said he believes the university has a long way to go.
“We certainly approve of the steps (they have taken), but they certainly need to do more,” he said.
Schlitz said the university has lost sight of its original mission and needs to remember its role as a service provider for the state of California.
“They need to realize that people are fed up with their antics and they are going to be in trouble with the public,” he said.
Gena Grebitus, deputy press secretary to the governor, said Schwarzenegger supported the bill because he supports open communication between the UC and the people of California.
“He supports transparency because it gives the public more confidence in the decisions that are made at the UCs and CSUs,” she said.