Sparks Fly Amid Payouts, Pay Cuts and Budget Talks : Torrance: In the face of a bleak fiscal year, an administrative leave program has workers outraged, managers on the defensive and council members in a quandary.

By DEBORAH SCHOCH

June 21, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

At Torrance City Hall, the rancor is growing fast.

Hourly workers speak bitterly of lost overtime and shrinking paychecks. Managers are increasingly defensive about an administrative leave program that can add thousands of dollars to their annual salaries as well as other benefits now under attack.

And City Council members appear to be in a quandary about how to placate both department heads and workers while balancing the budget in an austere financial year.

“This is a real difficult time, and we don’t have money. Everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else,” Councilwoman Dee Hardison said.

The controversy over the administrative leave benefits last week prompted council members to suspend budget deliberations until 7 p.m. Tuesday so they could obtain more information about the practice.

In the latest development, City Manager LeRoy J. Jackson has proposed reversing the $300,000 cut in overtime that angered a number of hourly workers.

At Tuesday’s meeting, council members will take up Jackson’s latest proposal and discuss a 93-page city report on management salaries made public Saturday.

The report outlines the costs of administrative leave, which has been described as a form of overtime for salaried managers. But at least one councilman, Bill Applegate, said Saturday that he wants to know why the program appears to have consumed more money than budgeted, costing $498,000 in 1991.

“I’ve got questions, again, and I’ve got to get answers,” Applegate said.

Among the strongest critics of the leave policy is Councilwoman Maureen O’Donnell, who said the program should be sharply curtailed and a separate merit-pay bonus program abolished. She predicted that her council colleagues will be “embarrassed into” making changes.

“My feeling is that if every city in this state offered 36 days administrative leave and cash out and bonuses, they would all be wrong. It would still be an unconscionable use of the taxpayers’ money,” O’Donnell said Thursday.

However, Mayor Katy Geissert said that she would be reluctant to change the policy without raising the base pay of managers, because administrative leave cash outs are part of the compensation packages offered to managers. “And I don’t see us in a position to raise the base pay,” she said.

The cash outs were adopted “primarily because there are managers who aren’t able to take time off,” Geissert said.

The cash-out provision, added in 1988, helps bring Torrance managers’ salaries in line with those paid to managers in comparable cities in the area, officials said. “Without that, we’re not competitive,” Personnel Director Elaine Winer said.

Geissert also accused the city’s largest union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, of using the administrative leave issue “as leverage for their own negotiations” for a new contract.

Flaring emotions are unusual in a city that prides itself on maintaining an appearance of orderly calm. But signs of strain were everywhere last week.

Some high-ranking city officials last week chastised union leaders and reporters for what they called unfair distortions of the policy that allows nearly 70 top managers to cash out 24 or 36 days a year allotted for “administrative leave.”

Meanwhile, some of the 200 workers who packed City Council chambers last week said they felt “belittled” that the proposed budget called for maintaining administrative leave while cutting $300,000 in overtime pay for hourly employees. The city, hard hit by declines in sales tax revenue, also does not plan to give workers any across-the-board raises in the coming year.

The city has refused to release the exact amounts of cashed-out leave paid to each manager.

AFSCME representative Guido De Rienzo last week denounced the perks paid to top managers. He called the administrative leave “a bonus on top of a bonus, and that’s totally unwarranted in these economic times.”

The equity question will be front and center Tuesday evening when the council resumes its review of the proposed $148-million budget and the debate over administrative leave.

City officials defend the leave policy, which can add roughly 14% to top managers’ pay if they choose to cash out all 36 days instead of taking time off. For example, a manager paid $75,000 a year could earn another $10,384 in cashed-out leave.

The report issued Saturday says that managers cashed out $498,499.84 in leave time in calendar year 1991, although the city had budgeted only $342,000 for cash outs in the general fund in fiscal 1991-92 and projects $360,000 in cash outs in 1992-93.

Jackson acknowledged that “it exceeds the line item we had put away,” but said that some of the cash-out money came from other funds and some is offset by job vacancies. In general, he said, “we’re ahead of the game on personnel savings across the board.”

Some council members were surprised to learn from Jackson last week that administrative leave could cost the city $600,000 if all 66 or 67 eligible managers chose to cash out all their leave this year.

“We never would have approved anything with that big a number to it. . . . That, I can tell you right now,” said Hardison, who was chairwoman of an ad-hoc council committee that reviewed management salaries in 1988.

And Applegate, who last Tuesday asked the Administration for documents showing the history of the program, said that he, too, does not remember hearing such a large figure.

Several council members said last week that they want to learn more about the program’s history and cost before deciding whether to alter it.

“I’m kind of in a wait-and-see mode until I see what we get,” said Councilman Don Lee, who added that he could think of department heads “that do 24 hours a week outside of the 9-to-5.”

The new report analyzes how many hours the city’s managers work. Many managers routinely work nine-hour days and work several hours on weekends, and department heads attend 45 evening council meetings annually, it states.

Department heads work from 92 to 144 hours in a two-week period, it says.

Administrative leave was listed as a benefit in job descriptions issued when managers were hired, according to the report. It includes nine sample job descriptions, including one from last summer for the police chief’s job.

The description for the chief’s job, later filled by Joseph De Ladurantey, promises that “36 days of paid administrative leave is granted each year in addition to vacation as compensation for overtime work, administrative responsibility or attendance at night meetings. Unused time is cashed out at full value quarterly.”

City records show that the 1987-88 package for top managers included a provision for administrative leave of up to 36 days a year that could not be cashed out. But the package a year later, approved by the council in July, 1988, added language allowing for cash outs quarterly or yearly.

That policy is more generous than the leaves offered by seven medium or large cities in the area surveyed by The Times. Most of those cities limit administrative leave to 10 days or less and forbid cash outs. Burbank, for instance, allows department heads to cash out their eight days’ “executive leave,” a Burbank official said.