Prop. 61: Bad Medicine

The real scandal about public salaries in California is that the state is so stingy with its governor and other elected state officials. Forty-five state chief executives get more than the $49,100 that Gov. George Deukmejian now receives. The Legislature finally saw the light a few years ago, and the salary will finally go to $85,000 starting with the next term in January.

But anti-government activist Paul Gann, a co-author of the tax-cutting Proposition 13 in 1978, knows that the salaries of public servants are an easy mark. Thus he has qualified for the Nov. 4 ballot one of the most misguided and potentially damaging initiative-petition measures ever put onto the ballot. One of the most important votes that Californians can cast this year is to vote no on Proposition 61.

Gann’s Proposition 61 effectively would put a $64,000 lid on all public salaries in California, except for the governor. Subject to court interpretation, the limit might be as low as $48,000 or $49,000. If this measure passes, California will have only one limited talent pool available to it for staffing the most critical of state and local jobs: rejects from other states.

No longer could California hope to lure a man like David Gardner to be president of the nine-campus University of California system. A competent hospital administrator will not work for $49,000 a year, or even $64,000. The same, at whatever salary, would be true of city managers, county administrative officers, criminal prosecutors, judges, fire chiefs, police chiefs, medical-school doctors and others who come to mind. We might as well put up a sign at the border saying: “No Talent, Brains or Experience Wanted.”

Consider just one example: Deukmejian’s search last year for the first director of the California Lottery, a position in which it was critical that California have a person of experience and integrity. The governor found such a person in the assistant director of the Massachusetts lottery. But that candidate withdrew when he discovered that the salary was only $73,780 a year. In fact, he told Deukmejian, it would have taken at least $100,000 for him to justify the move.

Gann has advanced no rationale for this measure other than his own personal gripe that public salaries cost too much. He once estimated that Proposition 61 would save $24 million a year out of an economy of $460 billion. Even the state legislative analyst said that the yearly saving from trimming the salaries of 9,000 state and local officials might be as high as $250 million.

Forget any real saving, though. The cost, in fact, would be incalculable. The legislative analyst has said that the expense could run as high as $7 billion if all officials involved were forced to take all of their accumulated vacation and sick leave at once in cash. Cooler heads acknowledge that the courts would not likely require that. But no one can be sure because, as with most of Gann’s ill-conceived measures, it is so poorly and vaguely written that virtually every provision would be subject to endless litigation and court interpretation.

Even when all that is sorted out, the real cost still could not be computed in dollars and cents. California public services are not perfect, but at least they are managed and staffed by people as good as or better than public servants anywhere in the nation. If Gann gets his way, that will no longer be the case. The entire governmental structure that serves the state will sag. The miracle of California and its economic opportunity, built on the foundation of an outstanding education system and public establishment, would not have been possible under a Proposition 61 mentality. In such a world, excellence would be just another word in the dictionary.

California needs innovation and excellence in government to provide the services that it needs to prosper. As in business, it must pay for those qualities. It could not do so under Proposition 61, which should be defeated on Nov. 4.