The Marin Board of Supervisors and the San Rafael City Council have kept their promises to give taxpayers a chance to review proposed employee contracts before approving them.
In recent years, the public was lucky to have three or four days — in some cases, three or four minutes — to review the cost and terms of contracts before the board and council voted to approve them.
They were approved after board or council members had spent weeks behind closed doors, going over details. They were familiar with the terms, but taxpayers were left in the dark — out of the decision-making loop.
That was before the recession put a bright spotlight on the current and future cost of some of those decisions.
Leaders of local public agencies, over the years, had approved generous pay and pension packages, confident they would be amply covered by double-digit returns on investments. The recession put a different light on those expectations as taxpayer costs for promised pensions and retirement benefits soared, consuming larger portions of municipalities’ budgets and forcing layoffs, cutbacks in public services and tax increases.
Critics of those pensions, last year, tried to convince public agencies in Marin to pass a law that would require a detailed public process for future contracts. The county grand jury also supported the move.
The proposal was aired at about the same time a grand jury report that questioned whether the county, the city of San Rafael and other public agencies had followed the letter of the law of state requirements for public disclosure of the short- and long-term costs of pension changes.
Both the county board and the San Rafael council promised to provide the public with more time to review proposed contract and pension changes before they are approved.
Last week, the county released details of new contracts that were to be up for approval by the board on July 19.
The proposed contracts will add $1.8 million to the annual budget — no small ongoing investment. Also, because pension benefits are based on workers’ paychecks, the contracts have long-term ramifications.
In some cases, public agencies are committed to budgeting 15 to 20 percent of their annual budgets for workers’ retirements. They made the promises and their taxpayers have to keep them.
Elected officials face the pressure of being the employers, setting salaries and benefits at levels they feel are necessary to recruit and retain workers — and within the financial constraints of agencies’ budgets.
Council members and workers already have access to that information. Taxpayers should as well.
That’s why members of the Citizens for Sustainable Pension Plans, Marin’s largest public pension reform group, turned out for the July 18 City Council meeting, where three proposed contracts were presented.
The group’s members asked the city to provide more details regarding the taxpayer cost of the proposed contracts.
City staffers say they will provide those details. They should do so in a way that clearly gives taxpayers enough time to review them.
While negotiations take place behind closed doors, the terms and costs of the contracts should be an open book and taxpayers, who pay the lion’s share of those contracts, are entitled to know those short- and long-term costs well before their representatives vote on them.
