UC President Offers Regents Steps to Regain Control of Pay Practices

University of California President Robert C. Dynes, under fire for an executive compensation controversy at the public university, on Wednesday announced steps aimed at strengthening controls over UC pay practices and reiterated his commitment to fixing the problems.

Addressing UC’s Board of Regents at the beginning of a two-day meeting at UCLA, a somber-looking Dynes said he was “intent on ... tightening up the system so the things that have happened do not happen again.”

The university is facing a number of investigations into its compensation policies and practices, after media reports that it has spent millions of dollars in recent years on bonuses and other perquisites for top administrators without fully disclosing that spending. During the same period, UC has repeatedly raised student fees.

The pay issues are the subject of a state audit and a separate, 10-year audit requested by the regents.

The governing board is scheduled to be updated on those efforts today.

Among other proposals, Dynes said, he will ask the regents today to approve restrictions on severance agreements, allowing the university to back out of extras promised at the time of hiring if an employee violates university policy or breaks the law.

Dynes has been strongly criticized for allowing the system’s former provost, M.R.C. Greenwood, who resigned in November during an investigation into conflict-of-interest concerns, to take a 15-month leave at her $301,000 administrative salary before she starts her new job, a lower-paid faculty position at UC Davis.

Dynes has said he made the decision after being advised that the terms of Greenwood’s leave, with the higher salary, were legally binding.

He also said Wednesday that he was proposing tighter controls on spending for capital improvement projects at the UC-owned or -operated residences of the system’s chancellors, as well as his own official residence.

That proposal grows out of criticism over several costly projects, including a reported $30,000 to build a dog run at the home of UC Santa Cruz Chancellor Denice D. Denton.

Also Wednesday, one of the university’s toughest critics on the compensation issue, state Sen. Abel Maldonado (R-Santa Maria), urged the regents to delay an ongoing process of placing employees, based on their current compensation levels, into a series of salary ranges.

Maldonado and other critics have said that the new salary structure, which the regents approved in January, gives the UC president too much authority to approve raises -- within those ranges -- on his own.

“In my opinion, in the past few months, if we have learned anything, it is that there needs to be more oversight in regard to the office of the president, not less,” Maldonado said.

He asked that the process be suspended pending completion of a state audit and other investigations.

Despite Maldonado’s request, a regents committee did move forward with the process of placing an additional group of senior administrators into salary ranges.

The full board must still consider the proposal.

Also Wednesday, UC officials for the first time said that if the university decides to bid on the federal contract to operate Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory when UC’s current management contract there expires in 2007, it will do so in partnership with Bechtel Corp.

In December, a team jointly led by UC and Bechtel won a contract to run Livermore’s fellow nuclear weapons facility, Los Alamos National Laboratory.

And in other action expected today, the regents are scheduled to vote on a proposal that UC divest all shares it holds in nine companies doing business in the war-ravaged nation of Sudan.