Administrative Leave Policy Under Review : Torrance: Council considers changes, but some members have reservations about city manager’s proposals.

The Torrance City Council is considering changes in a controversial policy that allows City Hall’s top managers to supplement their pay by converting up to 36 days of leave into cash each year.

A council committee is slated to meet this morning to review the policy, which has stirred acrimonious debate in a year in which city officials say they cannot afford to grant across-the-board pay raises to municipal employees. City leaders said the full council could act on possible changes as early as next week.

On Monday, City Manager LeRoy J. Jackson proposed reducing by 50% the number of leave days granted to city administrators while offsetting the loss with an increase in base pay for those employees. It is unclear, however, whether the City Council will concur.

Interviews with five council members on Wednesday showed that several support altering the existing policy but do not necessarily agree on how to do so. Three expressed opposition to Jackson’s proposal.

“Considering the economic times, I feel that there’s no place for administrative leave,” said Councilwoman Maureen O’Donnell, who has called for doing away with that leave altogether.

A total of 66 Torrance managerial employees now receive so-called “administrative leave,” which the city has described as a form of overtime for salaried employees. The leave is granted in addition to vacation time.

The council in 1988 began allowing managers to cash out unused time, but some council members have since said that they were not aware at the time how much the cash-out provision would cost.

Jackson told the council Tuesday that he accepts responsibility for failing to fully notify council members of the cost of the leave policy.

“I think there are many ways we could justify why that dollar figure was not there, but the fact is the dollars were not there,” Jackson said, adding: “I assume the responsibility for that lack of information. . . . I think that I am responsible for the failure to provide that information.”

He said the lack of cost figures was inadvertent. “It’s an error of omission, though. It’s not one of commission,” he said.

The city currently grants up to 36 days of administrative leave to top managers and 24 days to mid-level managers. Employees are allowed to cash out the days instead of taking time off.

Under Jackson’s proposal, top managers would get only 18 days’ leave to be either taken as time off or cashed out. The other 18 days would be converted into the managers’ pay, giving them about a 6.3% increase in that base pay, according to Jackson’s report.

Mid-level managers would see their leave cut from 24 to 12 days annually and would receive a pay increase, according to the report. Jackson also outlined possible changes in a much-debated merit-pay bonus plan for managers.

A three-member council committee now reviewing benefits for the city’s managers is due to meet at 7:30 a.m. today and will discuss administrative leave and the bonus program, members said.

The group’s chairman, Councilman George Nakano, said the committee has decided not to follow Jackson’s proposals.

And Nakano said that at the group’s Monday meeting, “We had a lot of questions, and I think all of us experienced uncomfortableness with his recommendations.”

Committee member Bill Applegate added that he, too, did not like Jackson’s proposals. He also hinted that he may not agree with some of his council colleagues about how to reshape the leave policy.

“I have a hunch I’ll probably have a minority report,” Applegate said Wednesday.

The issue of administrative leave has prompted bitter debate on the council and in City Hall, as some people blast the policy while others defend it as a means of compensating managers for time spent at night meetings, working on weekends and on emergency calls.

City administrators have maintained that, without the leave policy, total compensation for managers would fall below that paid to managers in comparable Southern California cities.

The Times reported last month that the city planned to continue administrative leave and other management perks, despite what Jackson calls the bleakest fiscal year for the city in 14 years.

City officials later disclosed that managers cashed out $498,499 in administrative leave during 1991--amounting to 88% of their total leave time. But those officials have repeatedly refused to make public what individual managers were paid last year.

The Times Mirror Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court last week in an effort to force the city to comply with the California Public Records Act and produce documents showing city management employees’ total compensation last year.

Nakano asserted at Tuesday’s meeting that press coverage of the administrative leave debate has omitted some information. In particular, he said that the Times “has come to be on a rampage against the city lately.”

The furor over the leave policy has proven particularly volatile because the city’s largest union--the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees--took aim at management perks as unfair and inequitable. The union, which represents 425 public-works and other employees, is now in contract negotiations with the city.

Guido De Rienzo, an AFSCME staff representative, said Wednesday that he thinks the city should consider changing the leave policy.

“During these tight fiscal times, one has to re-examine the types of perks that are set aside for executives,” De Rienzo said.