Top Community College Officials Get 12% Raises

The Board of Trustees of the Los Angeles Community College District on Wednesday granted a 12% salary increase over about three years to some top administrators, matching the scale of raises given previously to most of the district’s union employees.

The district refused, however, to divulge exactly what individual administrators are paid. The raises are retroactive to November 1996, meaning that most of those covered by the provision will receive a sizable lump sum to catch up.

The district’s college presidents, who earn between $76,479 and $94,744 a year, and most vice chancellors got 7% increases over two years pending completion of a board plan to tie their raises in the third year to performance standards yet to be established.

The 5-1 vote for the increases, with trustee Elizabeth Garfield opposed, was taken during a meeting held at the new South Gate Educational Center, a satellite of East Los Angeles College. Garfield voted no because contract negotiations with a few of the district’s unions are incomplete, and she said it would be unfair to reward top administrators before they had finished settling compensation issues with some of the employees.

District spokesman Blair Sillers said contract negotiations for the three-year period began in June 1996, a process in which one bargaining unit is dealt with at a time.

The first to settle was the faculty union, which won a salary leap of 22.5%, aimed at bringing teacher compensation closer to the pay in neighboring community college districts, officials said.

District Chancellor Bill Segura, whose contract pays him $140,000 a year, will receive no increase.

The raises come at a time when the district’s colleges have made deep cuts in their class offerings because of budget problems. But Baker said those cuts, determined campus by campus, arose from a separate board edict that the schools live within their budgets, which required paying back the district for past overspending.

Saying the information is private, the district’s chief attorney, Camille A. Goulet, declined to provide officials’ precise salaries--even to the board. The Times is contesting that decision.

The range of salaries for specific positions, information that was provided to the trustees, was not made available before Tuesday’s meeting. But a copy of the figures obtained by The Times shows that the vice chancellor for educational research could have earned as much as $98,969 before the raise.

Tuesday’s increases also included those for other employees, ranging from paralegals to executive secretaries, who are not represented by a union.

Chancellor Segura said the administrators’ salaries were far below the going rate in the area. The employees would still be underpaid if they got “two or three times” these raises, he said.