Sacramento City Manager and council care more about worker raises than the public | Opinion

Sacramento City Manager Howard Chan was the city’s lead in negotiating contracts with the various public employee unions representing police and rank-and-file staff. On Dec. 12, he recommended that the city council give the staff retroactive raises of 6% for 2023 and another 4% for 2024. The city council unanimously followed his recommendation.

Now just one month later, Chan informed the city council of the following: “What we approved, what you all approved and what we have been discussing over the last several months, we cannot afford.

“It’s not sustainable.”

Chan now says that a shortfall “north of the $50 million number” awaits the council when it deliberates the budget for the coming 2024-25 year. Nearly half of this budget gap is attributable to the council granting these unsustainable raises. And now they face little choice but to decrease vital city services.

Sacramento City Hall has become a scene of utter dysfunction. It feathers its bed one month and declares a crisis mere weeks later. Neither the city manager nor the council have shown any capacity to prudently run Sacramento in a way that represents the best interests of the public as opposed to themselves.

At Tuesday afternoon’s council meeting, Chan said it best. “So let me start by saying our employees deserve way more than our contracts call for, even though we negotiate in good faith with the unions. Because they are the heartbeat of this organization and we need to pay them and value them as such.”

This insular mindset says it all.

The public is the heartbeat of Sacramento. The residents from the Pocket to Meadowview to Oak Park to Natomas form the fabric of this city. These are the stakeholders that Chan, Mayor Darrell Steinberg and the council are to serve.

The time for Chan to have had the public’s interest was the night of the proposed city staff raises on Dec. 12. This was when he could have clearly described the public consequences of adding $24 million in costs to a city facing a structural deficit. He did not. Nor did a single council member manage to ask a single tough question.

As things played out, it sure looked like Chan was buying off the bargaining units with unsustainable raises so his own compensation proposal wouldn’t look so bad in context. On Dec. 12, he placed on the same agenda a 5% raise for himself (to a baseline pay of $420,000) plus an additional six weeks of vacation that he could cash out as a fat bonus. The council passed his record compensation on a 6-3 vote.

But Chan’s ploy backfired. Thanks to the dogged reporting of The Bee’s Theresa Clift, it turns out that Chan had violated state law by calling a special meeting with little public notice to raise his pay. Hardly a member of the public was left in the council chambers when the raises were doled out and the coming budget was blown.

A new vote on Chan’s compensation and that of fellow charter officers was scheduled for Jan. 9. By then, enough members of the public had caught wind of Chan’s maneuverings and complained to their council members to shift the tides.

The council took steps to prevent any city manager from placing a pay bump on any future council agenda. Some council members apologized for violating the law in December. It felt disingenuous at the time given how the council did not set the agenda. That responsibility fell to Chan, who did not apologize. Neither did City Attorney Susana Alcala-Wood, whose job it is to advise the council to follow state law to avoid this very type or problem.

By January, the real damage had been done. All those raises for city employees were binding financial commitments. And it hasn’t taken long for the impacts of this decision to unfold.

First, Chan canceled the annual New Year’s Eve fireworks show at Tower Bridge for financial reasons. And now he has lowered the boom on office supplies, travel and hiring. None of this will prevent real pain in the 2024-25 year.

These architects of Sacramento’s financial house of cards are who voters are supposed to trust to fix it.

Chan and the city council violated the public trust when it handed out unsustainable employee raises just before Christmas as if city hall prints money somewhere in the basement. They all flunked a basic test of financial due diligence and transparency.

City hall has taken care of itself at the public’s expense. And now the public, as a consequence, is about to suffer from Sacramento’s deeply flawed approach to setting the people’s government priorities.

This story was originally published January 25, 2024 at 5:00 AM.