End secret perks

Press-Enterprise 5/9/07

The boards that direct California's public universities are supposed to serve the public interest -- and serve it openly. The Legislature needs to pass SB 190, which would close a loophole in the state's 1967 open meetings law that lets the boards spend millions away from the public eye.

SB 190 would end the practice of the University of California Board of Regents and the California State University Board of Trustees meeting in secret to approve executive salaries and perks. The Senate approved San Francisco Democrat Leland Yee's bill on April 26. Now it is the Assembly's turn to pass the bill.

Basic tenets of open government should apply to the state's university systems. Public officials should spend public funds openly, not in secret. And citizens have a right to review, and react to, proposed public spending before officials in fact spend it, not merely after the fact.

Yet the San Francisco Chronicle found last year that Cal State trustees awarded $4 million in perks and extra compensation over the past 10 years without public review. And in 2006, the state Bureau of Audits revealed that UC's president gave $344 million in extra compensation to employees without informing the public.

Approving lavish salary packages and perks in secret erodes the public's trust in the leadership of California's university systems. And Californians are right to be skeptical when they learn about these perks from a prying press, not an open meeting.

SB 190 would place a trusty check on such largesse with public funds: citizen scrutiny.