Ethics Commission Sees the Light
Oakland’s Public Ethics Commission has seen the light and is now considering another amendment to the city charter which would allow put the question for future council salary increases before the voters. How kind of them to ask the taxpayers who foot the bill if they want to do so. So far, no word on whether the commission is prepared to put term limits before the voters.
They are apparently as yet undecided whether to require full time service for full time pay of $60,000 a year plus $550 per month car allowance for council members and $575 for vice mayor. Section 305 of the current charter and Section 1201 already contain language that can easily be used to describe the job as full time.
It’s too bad the commission didn’t think to request putting the recent 63 percent raise before the public before it was ratified by the Oakland City Council, creating a dilemma for at least one council member, John Russo, who has always been opposed to a pay raise for council members. He has publicly voiced his strong belief that serving as an elected public official is a civic duty, a public service, or even a calling and that the application of corporate or professional scale pay rates is inappropriate.
Whenever the compensation issue has come before the council his tenure, h has spoken out and voted against even small pay increases, and when outvoted, declined to accept the increase and passed it on to a charitable organization.
Russo argued against the creation of the Ethics Commission, warning it would be an invisible and unaccountable vehicle for a pay raise. Nevertheless, the voters approved its creation, and sure enough, just about their first order of business was a skyrocket increase in council salaries – just what Russo had warned against when out on the hustings campaigning against Measure J.
When, in the late spring of 1997 the commission held hearings on salary hikes, Russo was the only member of the council who testified before the commission against the pay raise.
Once the Ethics Commission had adopted and proposed the new salary of $60,000 a year, which with its attendant increases in insurance premiums, retirement payments with the city paying both the employer and employee share and other benefits boost the cost of care and feeding of the council by more than $300,000 a year, or about $1,200 per working day. Since the council is not yet considered full time, that’s more than $150 a working hour.
The city attorney ruled that the recommendation of the commission had to be voted up or down, that the council had no discretion in the matter, nor could it in any way alter or amend the increase concocted by the commission. The city attorney said, according to her reading of the city charter, the council had to ratify the recommendation of the commission, conveniently forgetting the well-established rule of public law that neither a city council nor the legislature nor the Congress can delegate its law making authority.
In any event, Russo was in a pickle. He wanted to vote against the pay raise as he had consistently done in the past. But as the city attorney explained it, the vote was not for or against the pay raise. It was purely a ministerial vote to ratify a decision made by a commission created by a vote of the people amending the charter which the city attorney said removed any discretion from the council. She said they had to ratify it by voting yes, like it or not.
That seems a strange way to do legislative business, but this is Oakland.
Russo is a proponent of responsible, accountable government, as are some other members of the council. Neither he, nor those couple of others bow to political opportunism. Consequently, when he voted to ratify the decision of the Public Ethic Committee, he did the responsible thing.
Speaking of the way our City Council does business, let me offer my congratulations to our new Vice Mayor Ignacio De La Fuente. He was elected to the office by the members of the council when Nate Miley resigned as vice mayor a year before his term expired. By tradition, the post rotates among council members on the basis of seniority. There was much protest that the appointment of the new vice mayor-who-would-be-mayor was not an inside political job to give a boost to what some political observers say is his faltering campaign. “Heaven’s no, no way…” describes the pious denials heard from council members almost in unison.
Unfortunately, Councilman Nate Miley blew the cover by saying, “It will allow him to chair the meetings and demonstrate his talents as a future mayor. People will have an opportunity to see how he would govern the council and convene meetings and things.”
Word on the street is that there was union pressure from many quarters including headquarters in Washington to make the change. As in the last presidential election, unions are expected to chunk big bucks into the Oakland mayoral race to ensure the election of the vice mayor who would then become one of organized labor’s “poster boys.” That’s one of the reasons that the vice mayor derided Jerry Brown’s several suggestions for campaign contribution and expenditure limits, calling them “stupid.”
Randy H. Hamilton is visiting scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Oakland.
-- Randy Hamilton, Oakland Tribune, Monday February 2, 1998.
