Amid uproar, CCSF chancellor says executive raises not official
In an effort to calm a furor over doubledigit executive pay hikes at financially troubled City College of San Francisco, Chancellor Mark Rocha said Monday that faculty and student protesters erred in thinking that the trustees had already approved the raises.
“The fact of the matter is that the administrator salaries have NOT yet been approved,” Rocha said in an open letter to colleagues. “It is not plausible that I would willfully ask the Board (of Trustees) to violate its own policy.”
He said he will present his proposal for executive raises to the trustees’ budget committee on Thursday for discussion, and to the full board on Sept. 26 for a vote.
The college has cut hundreds of classes and reduced faculty, staff and counselors to close a $32 million budget deficit. The news that students and faculty might still prevent the fat raises pleased Jenny Worley, president of the faculty union that organized Thursday’s angry protest on campus.
“He’s backtracking, and we’re happy about that,” Worley said.
Before Monday, college officials made it clear in several ways that the pay hikes were already in effect:
They listed the new salaries on Page 92 of the 201920 budget — approved by the trustees on Aug. 22 — and wrote in the budget that the raises had taken effect as of
July. Also, the college issued a statement Thursday — and reissued it Monday — declaring that the new raises were approved on Aug. 22. Finally, college officials posted the new executive salaries on the payroll website, where faculty leaders learned that the raises had been quietly approved, Worley said. The college removed the list of raises after Thursday’s protest and after The Chronicle published its story.
Those actions notwithstanding, Rocha said in his open letter that he assumed no one would think the new executive salaries were actually in place because “all were aware of Board Policy 1.26” requiring board approval of administrative raises.
“This was, however, an incorrect assumption on my part,” Rocha wrote. “I should have made this process clear from the outset.”
Although Worley said faculty appreciate the forthcoming public discussion of executive pay set for Thursday, she said instructors remain troubled that Rocha is portraying the proposed executive pay hikes as lower than they actually are.
She referred to Rocha’s open letter, titled “Committment to Transparency: the Approval Process for Employee Salaries,” in which he included a list of the 100 highestpaid employees at City College. To illustrate what the raises would look like, Rocha compared the employees’ 2018 gross salaries — all that they took home — against base pay proposed for 2019, figures that include no extra pay.
“It seems like a bit of a shell game,” Worley said, noting that the gross salary figures include “substantial allowances for things like transportation. It’s apples to oranges.”
She pointed to one senior vice chancellor’s situation in Rocha’s list: The executive earned total compensation of $230,354 last year. His proposed base pay would be $275,000. As portrayed, this executive would earn an additional $44,646, or 19% more.
But the executive’s raise would actually be higher — by the difference between the base pay of both years, or between the total compensation of both years.
It’s also unclear what the chancellor’s new salary would be because, as portrayed, he appears to take pay cut. His total compensation for 2018 was $361,352, while his new base pay would be $333,805, or 7.6% less. But without knowing Rocha’s base pay for 2018, it’s not possible to see whether he’s getting a raise or how much it would be.
What helped ignite last week’s protest was that faculty leaders used an applestoapples comparison of base pay for executive jobs in 2018 vs. 2019. It showed, for example, that vice chancellors with a starting salary of $124,358 last year would now start at $250,000 — more than double the old salary.
Asked to provide base pay for both years, Rocha’s office said Monday they were not available.
Worley identified a second issue: College employees are paid per fiscal year. But Rocha’s office provided the executive salary figures by calendar year — meaning that they included half a year’s worth of lower salary figures. Worley said this also allowed the raises to appear smaller than they actually are.
Neither Rocha nor trustee President Alex Randolph responded to requests for comment about how the salary figures were portrayed.
But Randolph acknowledged there were problems in the college’s overall communication about the sensitive issue.
“While all of City College’s employees deserve to be compensated competitively, including administrators, it’s clear that the administration did not manage this recent process in the most open and transparent way,” he said. “The Board is taking steps to correct that, and provide for a thoughtful debate in public.”
The board’s public meeting about the executive pay will be from 9 to 11 a.m. Thursday at the college’s Chinatown campus, 808 Kearny St., Room 402, San Francisco.