Posted on 05/28/2005 11:01:12 AM PDT by SmithL
OAKLAND - Alameda County paid nearly 800 government employees more than $100,000 each in the fiscal year that ended in July 2004, according to records released to the Times on Friday.
The records released by the office of Alameda County Counsel Richard Winnie mark a significant turnabout in the county's long resistance to making public the salaries of its highest-paid employees. The data shows that 115 employees with the title deputy sheriff made between $100,313 and $184,094 last year and that 74 with the title sergeant were paid between $100,203 and $170,165. The county employs roughly 10,000 workers.
County lawyers, under pressure from at least one employee union, would not identify the employees by name. Nor did the list break down the pay to show base salaries versus overtime.
The union, Local 21 of the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers, on Tuesday will ask a Superior Court judge to stop the county from releasing the employees' names while it awaits word on whether the California Supreme Court will take up a separate appeal dealing with whether employee names and salaries are part of the public record.
The county's refusal to release the names comes despite an April 18 state appeals court ruling in which a three-judge panel said names and salaries of public employees should be available to the public as a way to see whether taxpayer money is being spent appropriately.
The Times initiated that case after the City of Oakland and its employee unions tried unsuccessfully to block the release of salary information for city employees paid more than $100,000 a year.
Since the appellate court ruling, several cities and public agencies have released employee names and salaries. On Friday, for example, the AC Transit bus agency made public the names and salaries of its entire work force of more than 2,000 people.
Local 21, which represents workers in both Oakland and Alameda County governments, on Friday filed legal papers asking the state Supreme Court to hear an appeal of the panel's decision.
In a letter to the union released Friday, assistant county counsel Jeanine Nadel wrote that Alameda County would release the 788 names Tuesday unless the union can convince a judge to issue an order for it not to. The union is preparing to go before an Alameda Superior Court judge Tuesday morning.
"The county will be prepared to produce the remaining information on Tuesday unless the court issues a restraining order preventing it from doing so," she wrote.
Duane Reno, a San Francisco attorney representing the white-collar union employees, said the employees believe their privacy rights would be breached if their names and salaries were made public.
Reno said the union will take the same position in its appeal of the Oakland case to the Supreme Court.
This comes despite the state First District Court of Appeal ruling last month that found the public's right to know how government spends money trumps a public employee's right to privacy.
"Payment of public employee salaries is a public expense, and the amounts and recipients of that expense are public records. The people have the right to examine those records to monitor the conduct of public business," the court said.
That ruling upheld the Times win last year in Alameda County Superior Court when the newspaper sued Oakland after the city refused to disclose the names and salaries of employees paid $100,000 a year or more, citing privacy laws.
Reno said he believed access to an employee's name and salary might be appropriate on a case-by-case basis, if there was reason to suspect public money was being misspent in a particular instance.
But Times attorney Karl Olson said that two courts have already rejected the union's arguments.
"As far as the people who get these six-figure incomes, their paychecks have names on them, not blanks," Olson said. "There's no constitutional right to earn $100,000 or more from the taxpayers and at the same time hide your name from those same taxpayers."
Times Editor Chris Lopez said he was confident that the newspaper would again prevail if the Supreme Court agrees to hear the union appeal.
"Two lower courts already have said that government salaries are a matter of the public's right to know," Lopez said. "We hope the state Supreme Court will agree with us that taxpayers have every right to know how much governments pay their employees and who those employees are."
What's next:
On Tuesday, a union representing Alameda County white-collar workers will ask a Superior Court judge to block the county from releasing the names of government employees paid more than $100,000 a year.
In addition, the California Supreme Court will soon decide whether or not the salaries and names of government employees are a public record. Both a Superior Court judge and a three-judge panel of the state Appellate Court have ruled that the information must be released to the public.
-- Thomas Peele
>>Your tax dollars at work
i need to get out of the public sector.
I wonder if any of them are actually Americans
The vicious criminality of this is not just the gross pay of these public employees, but the pensions and benefits that accrue and are often driven by gross pay.
Aliens? Unlikely! And, in fact, there should an extraordinary degree of nepotism as new vacancies go to the friends and relatives of those already employed and those in charge. As a final area of investigation, check the other business interests of the high paid public servants, they'll either have close relatives on the public payroll or own an outside businees that employees relatives and does A LOT OF business with the public agency.
Mnay public employees have the pension benefits determined by the salary in year they made the mosy money. It only takes one jackpot year, and you are set for life.
good frickin grief !
all government employees should have their wages set at a percentage of the Presidents salary, with none exceeding it.
A policeman shouldn't earn more than 25% of what the President of the United States does.
Yup, it is unsustainable. Any state or municipality not moving quickly toward 401K type retirement plans will be meeting face to face with the grim reality of being unable to pay these pensions in the next twenty years.
Yes the yearly salaries are bad enough imo, but when you factor in the very early retirement at 80% of the highest year for life.. full family health benefits.. it is unreal.
Even if they switch now it won't make any difference for a long time. Because it will only apply to new hires, who wont' be retiring for a few decades.
And in addition the big wave is all those baby boomer government workers who are nearing retirement.
Incredible. Just incredible.
If taking advantage of overtime premiums and (as you call them) "minnies" is criminal, the please do us all a favor and start campaigning to get all overtime outlawed in America.
I am a public employee, working for a municipal utility, and I make $30-40k a year in overtime alone! I make that by being forced to work 7 days a week from mid-September to Christmas and for the rest of the year, by being awakened in the middle of the night to drive to work and fix a piece of broken equipment that threatens the city's power supply. Sometimes I don't even get the luxury of being awakened. Somedays, I get called back to work just an hour or two after I've come home from a 10 hour day and then have to return for an unspecified time that could be an hour or could be 16 hours.
When I hit that 16th hour in a 24 hour period that begins my double time, I don't feel like a criminal at all. I feel like a slave because my contract doesn't allow me the option of refusing overtime. When I get awakened at 1 am to drive to work and it only takes me an hour to fix the problem and I get paid for 4 hours anyway, I don't feel like a criminal because I have to drive home and then wake up at 5am to return to work for my "normal" work day.
More of my fellow "lazy union employees" that you think would love to have overtime banned so we can sleep at home and know exactly when our work day will start and end each day. I'll gladly take the cut in pay, because the free time would allow me to attend college at night so I can move up to an engineering or management position. Or I could use the free time to open my own business. But its hard to do those things when the phone could ring or the beeper could beep at any time and tell me that I have to report to work NOW.
BTW, I am not a union member, because I find unions repugnant--but I am still bound by the contract, and I don't complain about the gross wages that some union members make because they are usually doing work that most people can't or won't do and they do it under conditions that cubicle-dwellers can't even imagine.
Someone will probably tell me that I can always quit, but if we all quit, who would make your electricity: Mexican "immigrants"??? Can we add this to the list of jobs that Americans don't want to do to help justify illegal immigration?
Bravo, those power plants aren't exactly climate controlled are they:)
No wonder California's in trouble, it's run by a bunch of liberal crooks!
Does anybody know how to find out the salaries of public school administrators?
that's at least 80 million these 800 employees are costing !!!! no 800 workers in history are with that much.
Factor in the cost of living in California and it doesn't seem so much. As far as university employees (aside from coaches and presidents) are concerned, I only know of one who made more than 100k and that was from book and movie royalties, not pay from the state.
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