A state senator has called for a Senate Education Committee
hearing to investigate the University of California’s
compensation policies, which were called into question by a San
Francisco Chronicle article earlier this month.
Sen. Abel Maldonado, R-Santa Maria, called the hearing because,
as a public institution funded by taxpayers, the UC has a duty to
be open with its spending and make the best use of state funds,
said Tom Kise, Maldonado’s spokesman.
The Chronicle’s Nov. 13 article alleged the university
paid its employees millions of dollars more over the last fiscal
year than was disclosed in a consultant’s report on UC
salaries in September.
The chair of the committee, Sen. Jack Scott, D-Pasadena, has not
yet received the request because he is out of the country and so
has not made a decision as to whether the committee will hold a
hearing, said Wendy Gordon, Scott’s spokeswoman.
Kise said he was optimistic that Scott would agree to the
hearing.
The Chronicle article reported that the university paid $871
million in various bonuses, about $599 million of which went to
8,500 employees. These figures were not released in a September
report by Mercer Human Resources Consulting.
The report, which found salaries at the UC lagged behind
comparable universities by 15 percent, was released by the UC and
did not include various forms of compensation outside regular
employees’ salaries.
For Maldonado, the problem is not only about the significant
dollar amount, but also about general practices at the UC.
“It does not make sense to the senator that the someone
who is making six figures … is using the UC expense account to
buy their colleague’s wife a bouquet of flowers,” Kise
said.
After the Chronicle article, other news sources were quick to
jump on the story, putting the UC’s salary practices in the
spotlight across the state.
The UC, too, was quick to respond, defending many of the
payments as one-time compensation packages and saying such spending
was necessary to recruit quality officials. Within a day of the
article’s publication, UC President Robert Dynes had set up a
Web site to answer questions raised by the article.
In a statement posted on the site, Dynes said the Chronicle had
“omitted or mischaracterized some important facts,” and
at the November UC Board of Regents meeting he said a task force
would be formed to increase transparency in the university’s
practices.
Kise said Maldonado has called for a senate hearing in the hope
of clarifying the conflicting reports that have been
circulating.
“The idea of the hearing is to get to the bottom of what
is being written about in various news articles, so we can have a
clearing of the air and find out what is really happening
here,” Kise said.
Questions about the UC’s openness were the central concern
for Maldonado.
“One of the more troubling aspects of this issue for me is
the appearance of a lack of transparency and disclosure that
surround these compensation decisions,” Maldonado wrote in a
letter to Scott dated Nov. 28.
In the letter, Maldonado also said the hearing would “give
UC officials a public forum in which to better articulate these
policies and practices.”
The current economic difficulties in the state make the
UC’s high compensation packages all the more disconcerting,
said Bruce Hamlett, chief consultant for the State Assembly Higher
Education Committee.
“State resources are limited ““ why are we seeing so
much going into offline salary enhancements for
administrators?” Hamlett said.
Hamlett also questioned where the money for these large
compensation packages was coming from.
“Student fees have gone up dramatically the past couple of
years,” he said. “Is some of the money that’s
generated from student fee revenue being used to fund these
additional enhancements?”