Pay disclosure bills sink in final moments of legislative session

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Proposals to require city officials throughout California to publicly disclose their compensation were sunk in the Legislature on Tuesday amid political bickering, legislative dysfunction and resistance by lawmakers to cede control over how their own financial information is made public.

Though state lawmakers adopted restrictions on city salaries in response to the Bell pay scandal, they didn’t act before the legislative session’s end late Tuesday on disclosure bills seen by many as critical to preventing abuse. ‘I’m very disappointed,’ said Sen. Louis Correa (D-Santa Ana), who introduced a bill requiring city, county and school district officials to annually file a public report detailing their compensation, including pay, benefits and bonuses. ‘It was such an important bill.’ Correa introduced the legislation in response to Times’ reports that Bell’s former city manager was paid nearly $800,000 and members of the part-time City Council received $100,000.

Although the measure was endorsed at a news conference a week ago by the Legislature’s Democratic leaders, Correa’s bill, SB 501, languished on the Assembly daily file for three days before it was approved by that house at 10:15 p.m. on Tuesday. It was not given to the Senate until 11:45 p.m., which did not provide enough time for a required committee hearing and Senate vote before the midnight end-of-session, according to John Scribner, the senator’s chief of staff. ‘It got caught up in the house hostage taking,’ Scribner said, referring to the practice of one house holding the other house’s bills back until it receives its own bills back for action.

An aide to Assembly Speaker John Pérez (D-Los Angeles) blamed the Senate for delaying the transmittal of Assembly bills back over, which caused a logjam of actions needed by the house on its own bills before it could get to Senate bills including Correa’s. ‘We absolutely supported this bill and we passed it,’ said spokeswoman Shannon Murphy. ‘It’s unfortunate that there was mismanagement by the Senate. This bill became a victim of house mismanagement on the Senate side.’

Correa said he has been talking to Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg (D-Sacramento) about possibly including the bill’s language in a trailer bill for the state budget, which is expected to be taken up in the coming weeks. The proposal to disclose local pay turned out to be a touchy subject with some lawmakers, many of whom are former mayors, county supervisors and school district officials. ‘Some people opposed it because it didn’t go far enough. Some people opposed it because they thought it went too far,’’ said Correa, who vowed to reintroduce the proposal next year if it is not approved in the budget.

A second, more far-reaching bill didn’t even get out of committee on Tuesday. AB 2064 by Democratic Assemblywoman Alyson Huber of El Dorado Hills was killed in Governmental Organization Committee after the author refused to accept what she called ‘hostile’ amendments that excluded legislative salaries from its provisions. The bill originally would have required the Legislature to annually post on its website the salaries of all lawmakers and their employees. City and county disclosure was left in the bill, but senators told her she could either accept an amendment leaving legislative disclosure to house rules or drop her bill. She dropped her bill. ‘I don’t like this bill’ she told committee members about the changes. ‘We cannot with a straight face say to them [city officials] ‘a different rule applies to you than applies to us in the Legislature.’ ‘

The Senate later voted unanimously to adopt a non-binding resolution directing the secretary of the Senate to post all Senate salaries on its website. Steinberg said Senate Resolution 52 ‘commits the senate to this action now and into the future.’’ But Huber said a house rule is not sufficient, because it can be more easily and quietly changed than a state statute.

-- Patrick McGreevy in Sacramento