City Administrator Dan Lindheim is quoted in the column saying that he’s just trying to protect employee privacy, suggesting that the request for supervisors to disclose their relatives and cohabitants who also work for the City was too invasive, and that he doesn’t trust Ruby’s office to keep confidential information confidential. In remarks at an event on Friday, Lindheim called the column a “hit piece” and assured the audience that there was “not a fact in there, period.” He went on to say that “As to the nepotism and cronyism ordinance that it was referring to, that it is being absolutely implemented. So, in case anybody has any questions about that, just be assured that this bureaucrat is in fact doing what the Council has determined ought to be done.”

So…there were actually many independently verifiable facts in the column that are a matter of public record, and the column was about the hiring practices audit, not the cronyism ordinance at all. But aside from that, it’s not inconceivable that Johnson got some of the details wrong – it wouldn’t be the first time. However, also on Friday, City Auditor Courtney Ruby sent out a message to her mailing list saying that Johnson’s column was accurate, and that “the Administration is trying to withhold key documents essential to my audit of the City’s hiring practices.” Ruby asked that residents contact the Mayor’s office and demand that the Administration provide the necessary documentation to complete her audit.

I’m definitely not Courtney Ruby’s biggest fan, but I also have no reason not to believe her when she says that the City won’t provide her with the documents she needs. I certainly trust her more than I trust Dan Lindheim.

So Johnson wrote about the issue again today, this time talking mostly about Ruby’s e-mail and responses to it from various City officials. In today’s column, Lindheim once again questions the appropriateness of the information employees are being asked to disclose:

On Monday, Lindheim re-iterated his concerns about employee privacy and used employees in a secret same-sex relationship as an example.

“This ordinance is not just about nepotism – it asks about who you’re sleeping with, and that, in and of itself, is delicate and can play out in the workplace, but more an issue for non-heterosexual couples. If the information gets out, then they get outed,” Lindheim said.

So…this is outrageous. Dan Lindheim is the appointed City Administrator. It is his job to do what the Council tells him to do. It is not his job to decide whether he approves of the Council’s instructions. The objections to employee disclosure over privacy concerns were aired and discussed at great length, both by the Finance & Management Committee and the City Council as a whole. The Council heard the objections, listened to legal counsel, and then made a decision. It is now the City Administrator’s job to ensure that their direction is followed. That’s how government works.

How is it possible to have an orderly, efficient, or accountable government when bureaucrats decide they have the liberty to ignore Council direction if they don’t like it? Councilmembers are accountable for their decisions – if they make bad ones, they can be voted out of office. City staff is accountable to no one.

This is not the first time Lindheim has behaved as though he is above listening to the Council. Last March, when the Council was poised to vote on a motion regarding zoning near the Central Waterfront, Lindheim (then acting CEDA Director), approached the mic and told the Council that they were not empowered to do so. Ignacio De La Fuente responded that of course they were, and that he was obligated to do as directed in their motion. Lindheim then complained that he didn’t like the motion and got all huffy when they passed it anyway.

Then, of course, there was the time this summer, when (still as acting CEDA Director), Lindheim simply didn’t submit a report requested by the Council about what’s happening with the millions of dollars a year the City allocates under the Workforce Investment Act. After refusing to provide the Committee with an explanation for his failure to produce a report, the Committee tried to reschedule the item for a few months in the future, and Lindheim told them that they could schedule it for whenever they wanted, but he wouldn’t have the report for them then either.

At the aforementioned event last Friday, Lindheim also spoke about the ongoing zoning update process:

We’re in the process now of redoing the downtown area to make it consistent with the General Plan, which means that there’s this fight back and forth between what does the General Plan really mean? Because the problem is most General Plans or most planning exercises don’t mean much until you have a twenty foot building sitting in your backyard, and then you realize that maybe you didn’t want that.

This is now the third time I have listened to Lindheim suggest that our new zoning should not necessarily follow the dictates of the General Plan, because he doesn’t think people like the General Plan. Nevermind that the General Plan is the official document governing land use in Oakland, or that it was adopted by the City Council a decade ago after being craft with years of public input and debate.

This attitude is completely unacceptable. We cannot have unelected bureaucrats behaving like policymakers. Having the public’s business conduct in public is the cornerstone of transparent, accountable government. When the City Council makes a decision, staff has to follow it, whether they agree with the instructions or not. When the City Administrator himself, the most powerful official in Oakland, decides that it is within his discretion to ignore instruction, then what hope is there for transparency and accountability at any level within City government? The behavior is outrageous.

By the way…after reading a comment on The HarriOak News from someone who had tried to call the Mayor’s office about the issue only to be told that the Mayor’s office does not accept comments by telephone, I called myself. After all, I thought, such a thing couldn’t possibly be true? You can’t call the Mayor’s office to say what you think? It’s inconceivable! Sure enough, when I called, I got exactly the same response.

• Ron Dellums: I will comes to terms with the fact that a “strong Mayor” form of government means something, and in Oakland’s case, it means very specifically what Oakland voters amended the City Charter to say in 1998. I will accept that just because I personally am not impressed with what the Charter says about my duties, that doesn’t mean strong Mayor hasn’t been implemented, it just means that I don’t like what it is. I will stop constantly talking about how I am spending my time working to “streamline” the government to make myself an all-powerful dictator with no checks on my whims whatsoever, because it’s really actually kind of creepy. I will also eliminate the words “unprecedented,” “innovative,” and “revolutionary” from my vocabulary.

• Pat Kernighan: I will remember that people elected me to be a legislator, not a nanny, and I will keep my opinions about the morality of television shows and music lyrics to myself instead of trying to impose them on 420,000 people.

• Jane Brunner: I will read my agenda packet before all my meetings. If I don’t have time to do so, I will just keep my head down and be quiet. I will not waste an hour of everybody else’s time asking rudimentary questions about what’s going on.

• Rebecca Kaplan: I will not let down all the people who supported my campaign because they thought I would make informed, rational decisions by pursuing stupid things that have failed everywhere they’ve been done, and that Oakland has done before, but abandoned because it didn’t work. Like a land trust.

• Desley Brooks: I will recognize that even though it’s exceedingly frustrating to be like twenty times smarter than anyone else on the dais, that doesn’t give me license to be totally nasty to everyone else all the time. I will embrace my burden, and make a point of being extra patient with those I view as intellectually inferior to me from now on.

• Ignacio De La Fuente: I will either get the City of Oakland to adopt a 311 system and GPS, or I will find something new to talk about all the time.

• Larry Reid: When a vote doesn’t go my way, I will take it like an adult, and just type furiously on my Blackberry instead of storming out of the room in a huff.

• Jean Quan: I will realize that I’m not anywhere near as smart as I think I am, and also that it doesn’t hurt to listen to what other people have to say. I will not condescendingly lecture public speakers about how they didn’t bother to read the documents relating to a subject, scold them for daring to come to the meeting in the first place, and then give a speech where I get virtually every single fact I assert totally, 100% wrong.

• Nancy Nadel: I will work really, really, really hard to make my chocolate business successful. And once I succeed, I will do all Oaklanders a big favor and resign from the City Council.

• John Russo: I will always remember that seatbelt laws are for everybody.

• Courtney Ruby: I will start doing all the parts of my job delineated in the City Charter, even the ones that aren’t exciting enough to get me in the newspaper. Like reviewing major expenditures.

• And a bonus – every blogger using WordPress: I will take that creepy and distracting falling snow off my damn page.

What about you guys? Any special resolutions for 2009?

The general political climate in Oakland at the beginning of the summer was best summed up by the Trib in their Council race endorsements, which they introduced by saying “If there were ever a city crying out for leadership, it’s Oakland,” then proceeded to endorse the re-election of every single incumbent. Oakland voters followed suit at the polls in early June, and sent Nancy Nadel, Jane Brunner, Ignacio De La Fuente, and Larry Reid back for four more years.

Mid-June news of a large-scale gang bust by the Oakland Police Department was almost immediately eclipsed by allegations that Oakland City Administrator Deborah Edgerly had interfered with the 2-month investigation by tipping off her nephew, a member of the Acorn gang and City of Oakland employee, that his phone was tapped.

Faced with widespread citizen outrage, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums took the opportunity to demonstrate his unique ability to find the absolute worst possible way to handle a municipal crisis, first giving her until Monday, June 23rd to either resign or be fired, then pre-empting his own deadline by sending out an e-mail on Friday, June 20th directing all department heads to report directly to him. Nevertheless, Edgerly remained at the helm at the beginning of the following week.

Then on Tuesday, June 24th, Dellums held a press conference announcing that Edgerly would retire from her post, at the end of July (although she would continue to work for the city for as long as six months while selecting her own replacement) but claimed that the announcement was unrelated to the brewing scandal, saying her retirement plans had been in place since January. When pressed for details on the search for Edgerly’s replacement by Chip Johnson on KQED Forum, Dellums Chief of Staff David Chai remained insistent that the plan had been in place since January, but refused (or was unable) to answer follow-up questions about when the search for a replacement had begun.

By Friday, June 27th, Councilmembers Ignacio De La Fuente and Pat Kernighan were calling publicly for her to be placed on administrative leave until her retirement date, and Dellums finally did so that night, naming his interim CEDA director Dan Lindheim acting City Administrator. Edgerly fired back the next Monday, claiming that Dellums didn’t have the authority to appoint her replacement, in response to which, the Mayor finally fired her on July 1st, then told reporters the following day that claims he had behaved indecisively were “absurd.” Ultimate fallout of the Edgerly scandal is yet to be determined, awaiting the results of an FBI investigation, for which subpoenas were issued in late August.

Reaction to the Edgerly mess from the rest of City Hall varied widely. Oakland City Attorney John Russo, Oakland City Auditor Courtney Ruby, and Oakland City Council President Ignacio De La Fuente stepped in with government reform packages, offering proposals ranging from a new anti-nepotism law to an audit of hiring practices to records reform, while District 3 City Councilmember Nancy Nadel called such actions “opportunistic power grabbing (PDF)” and warned that we should wait for all the facts before “rushing to judgement.” Calls to eliminate waste in Oakland’s government were met with derision by District 4 Councilmember and wanna-be Mayor Jean Quan, who announced in a newsletter that she believes the worst case scenario is that the City has less than a million dollars in waste that could be cut.

The administrative crisis was compounded by a financial one. The Council passed a mid-cycle budget with $15 million in cuts in June, but got two bits of unpleasant news the next month. First, in response to findings of vote counting irregularities with LLAD from activist David Mix and ORPN founder Charles Pine, the Council admitted defeat and agreed not to collect the tax, putting them another $12 million in the hole. Then Dellums acknowledged that the revenue estimates he had presented in his (late) budget proposal were inaccurate by millions of dollars and announced he was bringing in former City Manager Robert Bobb to sort out the mess and find a replacement for Edgerly. Bobb announced two weeks ago that the actual deficit was somewhere between forty and sixty million dollars. Matier and Ross later reported that Oakland’s fund reserve dropped from over $60 million last year to $22 million currently. Although the City is unable to account for where the money went, Finance and Management Committee Chair Jean Quan tried to put a rest to concerns, saying “It’s not like the money was stolen.”

Things just got worse in August, when the City experienced a spree of local business robberies that appeared to have no rhyme or reason, with targets ranging from a pizzeria on Skyline to a nail salon in Temescal to a monument to mediocre cuisine in Rockridge. Dellums responded by blaming the economy, informing the citizens that the apparent crime rise is perception, not reality, and calling in the volunteer Guardian Angels to patrol our streets. The spate of high profile crime wasn’t limited to restaurant robberies – Oakland residents also got to deal with arsons in West Oakland, a four year old boy getting hit by a stray bullet, and this weekend, the second murder this year of a pregnant teenager. A Labor Day shooting in East Oakland brought the year’s homicide tally to 95, up from 88 this time last year.

In response to rising concerns about crime, the Council agreed to place a parcel tax on the November ballot that would hire 105 additional police officers and 75 additional police service technicians over the next three years, at a cost of $275/year for Oakland homeowners. Dellums named former County Health Department director Arnold Perkins as his temporary Public Safety Director. Although the public will have to wait until September 11th to see the Mayor’s full public safety program, residents got a preview of Perkins’s answers for the Oakland crime problem in a Trib editorial this weekend, where Perkins suggests to Martin Reynolds that citizens combat the crime problem on their own by bringing fried chicken to the groups of young men loitering on their streetcorners.

You know, following this stuff day to day, you’re always angry, of course, but as with anything, after a while you just sort of get used to it. There’s outrage, sure, but somehow it just gets dulled over time. I had a wake-up call this weekend, watching the way people not from Oakland reacted to my telling them, in this kind of jaded, matter-of-fact way, about the restaurant robberies and the statements in response from Dellums and Tucker. Their response, which was just complete disbelief that anyone would tolerate living in such a place, made me realize just how totally, totally fucked-up the situation is in this town. (I am sorry for the language. Although I may have a few sailor-like tendencies in person, I do try to restrain myself on the blog, but sometimes there are no other words.) The people of Oakland deserve better, and there is absolutely no reason we should tolerate the status quo even a day longer. Immediate action is needed from City Hall. As for what that action should be, well, you’ll have to wait for tomorrow on my thoughts there. Today is just about reveling in completely justifiable outrage.

Their reform package, like De La Fuente’s, might be seen by some, as Nancy Nadel suggested in her inane statement (PDF!) on the Edgerly matter, as “opportunistic power grabbing.” I wouldn’t characterize it that way – I mean, both packages are certainly opportunistic. But when you, like De La Fuente and Russo, have been trying for years to get anyone to listen to you and nobody will, then you’d be a fool not to seize a scandal like this as maybe your one and only chance to get people to take reform seriously. As Russo said last week:

There is nothing in this package that we have not, either together or separately, brought forward over the past several years. In fact, some of the changes we’re proposing on personnel were the administrative policy of this city earlier in this decade and were changed several years ago, in my estimation to the detriment of the public interest.

Anyway, for those who managed to miss it, Russo and Ruby held a press conference last week, in which they announced a package they’re calling “Real Oakland Administrative Reform” (ROAR). It includes:

• The whistleblower protection ordinance (PDF!), first introduced (PDF!) by Ignacio De La Fuente in February, and sponsored by Councilmembers De La Fuente and Kernighan, which will be passed by the City Council on Tuesday.
• An anti-nepotism ordinance (PDF!), to be sponsored by De La Fuente, which would broaden the anti-nepotism provisions found in the City Charter (PDF!) by covering a larger number of supervisors and wider spectrum of relationships. It would prohibit relatives from working in the same chain of command and from influencing the hiring of their relatives, as well as require certain disclosures at the time of hiring.
• Reform of flawed personnel department procedures to reduce taxpayer liability. See draft proposals here (PDF!), here (PDF!), and here (PDF!).
• An employee ethics program (PDF!) that includes mandatory ethics training for all supervisors. Much like the mandatory sexual harrassment training that I used to find myself having to sit through every year before I started working from home, I don’t really imagine that this will have any impact on anyone’s behavior. But you can’t blame them for trying.

And then one more, the one most interesting to me, personally, which is the reason I decided to write about this in the first place, reforming the City’s records management practice and policies. OMG, our records retention policy is so horrible. Russo agrees, saying at the press conference:

They way records are maintained in this City is not acceptable in a modern organization. There are all kinds of excuses about why it can’t be done, and I think they’re largely bogus and an excuse to preserve the current regime of non-accountability. Because when you don’t have the e-mails, no one ever actually does something. Things just magically happen and no one is responsible. It’s about transparency and it’s about accountability and the public’s right to know.

So part of this records reform is the creation of a Records Reform Group (PDF!) and a Records Management Review Task Force, which will consist of seven community members, including representatives supplied by the League of Women Voters, Society of Professional Journalists, Public Ethics Commission, Chamber of Commerce, and the Central Labor Council, and two members appointed by Councilmembers, one by Council President Ignacio De La Fuente and one appointed by Councilmember Jean Quan.

Okay, so this is great. Really, it is. But I have some concerns as well. I really hope that the records management policy review goes further than drawing self-evident conclusions about how records should be maintained longer and made more easily accessible to the public. My big concern about the task force is that the brief description in the document linked above makes no mention of the use of experts in the field of records management. It is entirely appropriate for the task force to feature citizens with a vested interest in better public information and public records, but it is hard to imagine that without records management professionals among their membership, they will come up with the best possible recommendations. Records management is a complicated field, and you need people who have worked in it to keep the group grounded as far as best practices, standard practices, what’s possible, what’s realistic and what’s not.

In my ideal world, I would like to see the Task Force expanded to include the community representatives mentioned above, and then also at least two other community members who are certified records managers whose expertise can guide the group to make better decisions. I don’t care who gets to appoint them. I also hope that whatever ends up coming to the Council and passing (Russo claims he wants the new records policy passed by the end of the calendar year) includes a recommendation to adopt a real integrated document management system for use by the entire City, like Interwoven.

So when Ruby’s first audit came out last November, I was irritated with the way the media and the public reacted. Obviously, all questionable financial transactions should be examined and we should do everything we can to ensure we’re using taxpayer money properly. But the insane amount of praise heaped on Ruby and outcry over “corruption” in the City in response to her hiring an outside firm to identify $3 million in improper payments over a three year period out of a $598 million annual payroll seemed really ludicrous to me at the time, and even more so now that a follow-up report from the City’s legislative analyst shows her numbers were totally wrong.

You know, Courtney Ruby made all sorts of big promises when she was running for office about how she was going to restore integrity to the Auditor’s office and fight for transparency and fiscal integrity. I totally bought it. I don’t know if was all her fancy endorsements, or wanting to support a fellow Texan, or her promises of reform, or her impressive resume, or the fact that she had been on the budget advisory committee, or what, but I was so excited to cast my vote for her in both June and November of 2006. When Roland Smith approached me at forum asking for my vote, I actually laughed at him. I feel like such an idiot now. I wish I’d voted for Michael Kilian in the primary, but for the run-off, I think maybe I would have been better off voting for Smith. I mean, it certainly sounded like he was a creep, but at least he actually did some auditing, even after the City had to take away all his staff.

What has Ruby done? Nothing! She has not delivered even one staff audit in 16 months! She has not reviewed large expenditures as required by the City Charter. She is not present and not productive. I don’t think I’ve ever regretted a vote this much. I guess this is how people who voted for Dellums must feel now. Sigh.

Allowing people to buy-back vacation is a fairly normal business practice, and Edgerly’s correct when she says that it’s cheaper to let employees do it sooner rather than later (the cost of vacation increases over time due to pre-negotiated annual salary raises). So yeah, fix the guidelines so they make more sense, make sure that Administrative Instructions gel better with our various MOU’s, and maintain better documentation. It’s not rocket science. But while everyone is busy getting all worked up about giving city employees a total of less than $400,000 in performance bonuses over three years, remember that the Council is about to approve an expenditure of $575,000, $375,000 of it being Measure Y money, over the concerns of the Measure Y Oversight Committee, for the world’s vaguest RFP. I mean, come on.

I wrote already about how the Oversight Committee asked the Mayor’s office to return with more details about their proposal. After their meeting, Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums sent a letter to the Council asking them to ignore the Committee’s concerns:

The November 19 meeting ended with a motion that we wait and come back next month to discuss the matter further. However, the majority of questions asked by committee members centered on details of what the RFP will look like, the methodology of the street outreach workers strategy, etc. – questions that will be answered in the development of the RFP itself and in the responses received by service providers to an RFP once issued.

Given the intensity of street violence in Oakland, I feel strongly that we cannot afford to wait. As such, I respectfully request that the Council take up this matter as planned at tonight’s Public Safety Committee meeting, and bring it before the full Council as soon as possible.

Okay, first, if the need is so urgent, one has to wonder why Dellums couldn’t, you know, get a proposal together more quickly. He announced the plan in September, but a month later, when the allocation was originally supposed to be heard by the Measure Y Oversight Committee, the office hadn’t managed to formulate a plan. They still haven’t done so.

And seriously, look at what Dellums is saying in the letter. The Oversight Committee was asked to approve issuance of an RFP to allocate $375,000 of Measure Y money, but before they did so, they wanted to know what the RFP would ask for. But the Council should just approve the RFP anyway, because we’ll tell you what we’re asking for after we write it! Nice.

The plan here, in order to expedite the process, is that the Mayor’s office, once they get the Council’s approval, will issue a Letter of Intent about the RFP immediately. Then interested parties will respond to the Letter of Intent explaining what they would do with the money. Then the Mayor’s office will write an RFP based on the responses they already got. I’m sorry, but this seems so…I don’t know…whack. They’re basically saying they want to pick out who they’re going to give the money to, then write an RFP designed specifically for whoever they’ve already chosen. Talk about a mockery of the competitive bid process.

Of course, the Oversight Committee will get another chance to endorse the allocation on Monday, when they will have an emergency meeting called by the City Council, at which the sole topic will be Dellums request for the RFP. I completely fail to see how this makes things any better. To vote to approve the RFP over the Oversight Committee’s objections (and remember that the majority of committee members support the plan in theory – they just felt it wasn’t responsible to approve without a minimal level of detail) and THEN to call an emergency meeting of the committee on 6 days notice for the express purpose of having them rubber stamp a proposal that you’ve already said you’re going to approve no matter what they think shows as much respect for their input as when I was a little girl wanting to help my dad make gumbo and he’d tell me that I could be a super big help by fixing him a gin and tonic. I was so proud of myself! The first rule of cooking is that the chef need a drink! Otherwise, everything will be ruined! What an important job! How special that Daddy trusts me to handle it! Also, if I hang around long enough, he might let me taste a piece of andouille and confirm that it tastes good enough to add to the pot!

But the Oversight Committee isn’t made up of six year olds. They’re adults who care enough about the community to give up their time to try to make sure the violence prevention act actually, you know, prevents some violence. Their concerns were well-reasoned, earnest, and legitimate. Contrast this with the attitude of Nancy Nadel and Jean Quan at Tuesday’s Public Safety Committee meeting, when they both said they had wanted for some time to see street outreach to more at-risk populations, so go for it. If the need is so urgent, shouldn’t we take some steps to ensure that we’re giving this money to something that will actually work? Shouldn’t we think about what we’re actually going to use it for? Street outreach to high-need individuals in high-stressor areas is great, but it also isn’t a plan.

And the reason I keep harping on this isn’t because I hate street outreach or I want to pick on every last thing Dellums does or even because I care so much about Measure Y in particular. It’s because when you pull shit like this, it pisses people off and then they won’t give you more money when you ask for it. At this point, does anyone think Measure Y has a shot in hell of getting renewed? Same goes for every other bond and tax increase the Council decides we so desperately need.

Last fall, I spent hours and hours and hours campaigning for Measure N, the library bond. Every single day after work, I would take the bus to some real estate office in like, Montclair or something, and spend my evening cold calling voters to ask for their support. Now, I’m not a particularly outgoing person, and talking to strangers and talking on the phone are both pretty near the top of the list of things I hate and fear. But I struggled through it every damn day (and even passed up tickets to ACLS games!) because I thought this was important. And every day, I would talk to a whole lot of people who told me they really wanted to support the library, and it was hard for them to say no, but that they simply couldn’t trust the City to spend their money the way they promised. “But there will be an Oversight Committee!,” I’d tell them. And they’d say things like, “Yeah, how’s that working out for Measure Y? Let’s talk about Measure DD!” And really, how am I supposed to argue with them?

Oh, and don’t even get me started on the freaking District Attorney, who, according to the Trib, is eager to study a report that doesn’t even allege deliberate malfeasance:

Ruby said at this time, her office does not plan to move the audit forward with the Alameda County’s District Attorney’s office. But Alameda County District Attorney Tom Orloff Thursday said he does plan to review a copy of the audit.

This is coming from the boss of our local ADA, Tom “We try not to put people in jail” Rogers, who flat-out refused to provide the Council any information about the outcomes of the cases our police force passes on to them, when asked to do so for a report on solved crimes (PDF!) the City Council’s Public Safety Committee received on Tuesday. Donnez-moi un break, Orloff, and start doing your actual job.

But the Chronicle story on this begins with a level of horror that I can’t quite get behind:

Oakland has paid city employees millions of dollars in bonuses, leaves, cash-for-vacation deals and auto allowances in recent years, far exceeding compensation set in labor contracts and with little or no oversight, according to a city auditor’s report obtained by The Chronicle on Wednesday.

Employees of the cash-strapped city – which is reeling from violence, a shortage of police officers and a dilapidated infrastructure – were allowed to cash out unused vacation time and received millions of dollars in perks, much of it not subject to scrutiny, according to the report, which the newspaper obtained under the California Public Records Act.

I guess so. The tone of the article seems (to me, anyway) to imply that this is some kind of revelation, exposing millions of dollars in shady expenditures. Judging from the repeated cries of corruption comments on both this and the Trib story, I think it’s safe to assume that I wasn’t the only one who read it that way. But corruption isn’t the issue. The report, available on the City Auditor’s website, examines the City’s payroll practices and makes a number of recommendations for improvements to efficiency and transparency, saying:

To ensure the integrity of City expenditures and the consistent treatment of all employees, the City needs to improve internal controls relative to off-cycle business processes.

Okay. So while the City really should act on Ruby’s findings (she makes a number of excellent recommendations), people should also relax a little bit. The report concluded that standard payroll (that would be the bi-weekly timecards submitted and checks issued for City workers) is fine, but off-cycle payroll (retroactive payments, leave buyouts, and bonuses) need improvement:

Specifically, we found the City employees conducting payroll activities have little formal guidance or written policies and procedures stipulating the roles and responsibilities for executing these varied and sensitive transactions.

The report doesn’t conclude that the transactions in questions are necessarily inappropriate, but rather that off-cycle payroll behavior tends to lack documentation justifying its necessity:

If the City established – and followed – a set of written, comprehensive procedures describing roles and responsibilites that provides specific guidance and direction, many of the issues noted during our audit could easily be corrected.

Take bonuses. I don’t see anything wrong with providing bonuses recognizing good work. Over three years, paying a total of $387,597 to 324 employees (out of almost 6,000 total) ranging from $75 to $10,000 (88% of which were less than $1,500) hardly seems unreasonable. What is a problem is that the City provides little in the way of guidelines governing issuance of the awards.

We found that City administrative guidelines and rules for cash awards and employee recognition payments are dated, non-specific, and left largely in form and practice to department heads and the City Administrator.

The report also complained that bonuses were not accompanied by written documentation explaining the reason for the bonus. Ruby found similar problems in the case of retroactive pay. In two cases of retroactive payment correcting initial underpayments, the accompanying documentation was a document detailing the initial pay rate versus the amount the were supposed to be paid. The report complains “ there was no written justification or authoritative document provided to explain the underpayment and justify the higher rate.” Of course, if no one tells you that you need to provide justification, why would you?

Both the Trib and the Chronicle made note of the annual costs of car allowances, which doesn’t seem that big a deal to me. It seems reasonable that if you have to use your private vehicle regularly to do your job, then it’s fair for your employer to reimburse some of the costs. (Such practices are routine in many private sector jobs.) City employees whose jobs involve significant amounts of car travel get monthly automobile allowances. Other employees can receive reimbursement for miles traveled if they have to drive their car to attend say, an off-site meeting. The report found that for 2006-07, the city paid out $700,000 in such allowances. That money went to a total of 238 employees, who receive allowances ranging from $137.55 to $750 per month. The report concludes that there is “little monitoring and oversight are exercised for these employees once the awards are granted.”

So once again, I agree with the conclusion that there should be more oversight. Car allowances, once awarded, are apparently rarely revisited to determine if they continue to be needed. But personally, I’m more concerned with inefficiencies in fleet management (PDF!), which the Council will be discussing next week. Although it’s more cost effective to provide automobile allowances and mileage reimbursements than to provide City-owned vehicles for employee use for vehicles driven less than 14,000 miles per year, we’re wasting money on 431 sedans that fall below that threshold. For a vehicle traveling 3,600 miles per year, it costs the City $2,663 more per year to keep and own that vehicle than to provide a car allowance and mileage reimbursement. Right now, we’re keeping 85 sedans (PDF!) driven less than 3,600 miles per year as part of our fleet. Stupid! We’re keeping all these cars for use by individual departments, wasting money on parking and maintaining them, when we really should be maximizing the usage of pool cars, which can be used when needed and will allow use by a number of drivers and departments on any given day.

I’ll conclude by defending the City (for once) against charges of wastefulness. One Chronicle commenter said:

One poster in an earlier thread mentioned that the budget of the City of Denver, which has a larger population than Oakland, is less than half of Oakland’s. There is something seriously out of whack if this is true.

Well, it isn’t true. The City of Denver’s proposed 2008 budget is $1.87 billion, significantly larger than our $1.07 billion. Denver’s population, according to the American Community Survey for 2006, is 566.974. We have a little under 400,000. Doesn’t mean that nothing’s out of whack, but that particular accusation, at least, is wrong.