Torrance Cuts Back Leave Days for Officials : Government: City managers will get 24 administrative leave days under new policy, down from 36. They will be able to cash out up to 18.

Moving to defuse a source of intense controversy between city management and rank-and-file municipal workers, the Torrance City Council has partially reined in a leave program that last year added nearly $500,000 to the paychecks of city managers.

In a 4 to 2 vote Tuesday, the council shaved the so-called administrative leave available to top city managers from 36 days to 24 days. Under the new policy, which takes effect immediately, only 18 of those days can be cashed out annually.

Previously, managers had been allowed to cash out all 36 days of their leave time, which is granted in addition to vacation time and has been described by city officials as a form of overtime pay for salaried employees.

The council delayed cutting leave time for middle-level managers, saying the issue must be discussed further as part of ongoing labor negotiations.

Mayor Katy Geissert and council members Dee Hardison, Don Lee and George Nakano voted for the rollback, but Bill Applegate and Maureen O’Donnell opposed it, saying they favored deeper cuts.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Applegate harshly questioned whether the council was fully briefed in 1988 when it voted to let managers cash out 100% of their unused administrative leave. He chastised City Manager LeRoy J. Jackson for what he called an “unexplained ‘failure to communicate’ ” the full cost of the cash-out program, which is intended to offset the time that managers spend attending night meetings and performing other after-hours work.

Countering Applegate’s criticisms, Geissert and Hardison said Jackson did not intentionally mislead the council on administrative leave.

“If there needs to be some blame laid,” Hardison told the council, “I will accept it as one of the five council members that are still on the council from that time for maybe not asking enough questions, not going back at some point and questioning it.”

Geissert agreed.

“I don’t think that there has been any attempt on the part of management or the people who represent management to withhold information from us,” Geissert told the council. “I don’t think there has been any kind of conspiracy or dishonesty. Certainly, errors were made in judgment on questions that were asked and information that perhaps should have been red-flagged. But I do not agree that this was some sort of a deliberate conspiracy.”

O’Donnell on Wednesday called the changes “token cuts” in management benefits. But she added: “Staff is not to blame for what has occurred. They have merely accepted what was given to them. . . . I am not implying they are bad people.”

Tuesday’s vote followed six weeks of wrenching debate over the leave policy. The Times first reported June 4 that despite a stringent budget year, the city planned to offer its managers administrative leave and year-end merit bonuses.

Angry rank-and-file workers protested that the City Hall administration was applying a double standard by maintaining management perks at the same time that employees were being denied cost-of-living raises.

City officials have repeatedly refused to disclose the actual amounts of administrative leave paid to individual managers last year, despite requests from The Times dating from early June.

In response, Times Mirror Co., owner of The Times, filed a lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court in late June to force the city to comply with the California Public Records Act and produce documents showing city management employees’ 1991 compensation.

Finance Director Mary Giordano says she has not yet calculated how much money the city will save as a result of the cuts. But a report by a council committee that studies management salaries says the trimming of administrative leave means a pay cut for top managers of 4.6%. That comes in addition to a 2% pay cut that will result from another decision taken by the council Tuesday--to freeze a merit pay program created for city management.

City managers greeted the cuts coolly.

“Obviously no one is happy about getting a reduction in our pay, but we are, to a person, professionals,” said Fire Chief R. Scott Adams, a member of the city executive staff who has served as a liaison with the council committee handling compensation. “We will show great restraint about our personal feelings about this and continue to be the professionals that we are.”

Nor were the cuts applauded by the city’s largest labor union, which asserted they should have been deeper.

“People are still going to be able to cash out $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, $5,000, $7,000,” said Guido De Rienzo of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which represents 425 of Torrance’s city workers. “I’d certainly like the people in our unit to have that option. . . . It’s still an inequity.”

Overall, the cash-out cost of the administrative leave program has steadily increased in the four years since cashing-out was first allowed, totaling $338,545.71 in calendar year 1989, $429,476.95 in 1990 and $498,499.84 in 1991, city officials said.

The city has blamed the swelling expense on more employees cashing out their leave days instead of taking time off and on the general increase in salaries on which the cash-out is based. Currently, they say, managers have been cashing out 80% to 85% of their available leave time.

“The current administrative leave program is not reflective of the initial understanding by the City Council of the leave being cashed out up to 50% and the remaining 50% being used as time off,” the report from the council committee stated.

In the past, city administrators have defended the administrative leave program on grounds that without it the compensation Torrance pays its managers would fall below that of other cities in Southern California.

Asked if he was disappointed by the council’s action Tuesday, City Manager Jackson said: “We will carry out the actions that they’ve taken. It’s my job to implement what’s been done, and I will.”

Jackson said he does not know how much he cashed out in administrative leave in 1991, although he estimated that it was slightly less than $15,000. Although he said he cashed out 242 of the 288 hours in leave time available to him, he added that he would need to sort through his pay stubs to determine the precise dollar figure.