Vallejo's Bankruptcy Highlights Need for Transparency in Government

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Peter Scheer
Executive Director
California First Amendment Coalition

The city of Vallejo has taken the extraordinary step of filing for federal bankruptcy protection. While the financial distress of this San Francisco suburb (population 117,000) is especially acute, its fiscal problems are fundamentally the same as those facing many California cities and counties--and, indeed, the state itself.

To the familiar litany of causes--falling sales tax revenue, the home mortgage crisis leading to collapsing home prices and lower real estate taxes--there needs to be added one more: Too much government secrecy.

Vallejo is broke, and other cities and counties may be close behind, because their personnel costs--salary and benefits for current employees and retirees--are higher than they can afford. While decisions at the state level are partly to blame, ultimate responsibility for the mismatch of revenue and expenses rests with local elected officials who, meeting in secret, have managed to avoid public discussion of the true cost and fiscal impact of the pay deals that they have approved.

If no one is watching, it's easy for public officials to give generous pay and benefit increases without having a clue how to pay for them. That's not so easy to do in a public session, where voters demand to know how much taxes will have to be raised, and how much other expenses cut, in order to make good on the promised increases in compensation. Such resistance is called political accountability, and it obviously depends on public access to the meetings in which elected representatives make their decisions.

Although in theory legislative bodies in California must operate in the "sunshine," the Brown Act, the state's open-meetings law, carves out a huge exception for negotiations with public employee unions. The combined effect of this exception, and separate provisions of the labor code, is to close the door, pull down the shades and turn off the lights on virtually all decisions relating to employee compensation and other terms of union contracts ("collective bargaining agreements").

Negotiating positions are determined in secret, negotiations themselves are conducted in secret, and negotiated contracts are ratified in secret. By the time the public gets to see the compensation provisions of a new union contract, it is already a done deal--indeed, any effort to change the terms likely would be a breach of the contract.