City Says It Tried To Comply With Public Record Request

The city said time and money prevented it from fully complying with a local newspaper's public records request for employee compensation data.

It also insisted that handing over information about health-care contributions would violate the privacy of city workers.

The Bay Area News Group this week published a massive archive of public employee salaries, which it put together from information gathered through hundreds of public records requests.

The list includes the names, titles and 2010 wages of 224,346 public workers across the Bay Area – including those who work for the city of San Ramon.

 Not because it didn't want to, said city spokeswoman Cheryl Wade, but because to compile it would take too much time.

But hundreds of other public agencies provided the information without a fight, noted Bay Area News Group Executive Editor Kevin Keane.

The city was especially adamant about not providing employee health-care information.

To offer up medical payment records linked to named employees would risk "running afoul of a federal law," according to a letter City Clerk Patricia Edwards mailed to the Bay Area News Group on March 1.

Edwards cited the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, saying it protects information about individual's health as well as health-care payments.

"This is interpreted rather broadly and includes any part of an individual's medical record or payment history," Edwards acknowledged in the letter.

"We strongly disagree, and note that other government bodies have had no difficulty providing health-care related data," Keane wrote in an email to San Ramon Patch.

The city did submit to the newspaper the gross wages and pension contributions for the 577 people who work for the city and police department.

The city's 12-year-old computer system would have made collecting the rest of the information costly and labor intensive, Wade said. The city would have to manually input the information for each employee from a 300-page report onto a spreadsheet in order to give the newspaper what it wanted, she added.

She said it took a full-time employee three weeks to provide a salary list to the media last year. And with the city's hiring freeze and 37 layoffs since 2008, compiling the information would be a strain on the agency, she said.

"We believe in open government transparency ... [but] getting that info is very time consuming," Wade said.

She invited anyone who wants the information to look it up at the city's finance office.

"The law states that we have to provide it in the format we do business in ... the law requires us only to give you what we gave [the newspaper]," Wade said.

Keane said the city should have found a way to submit the information as requested.

"The people of San Ramon have a right to know how their tax dollars are being spent," Keane wrote. "Right now, the city seems intent on putting up roadblocks to full disclosure."

Former City Manager Herb Moniz's salary became controversial when the Bay Area News Group reported he earned more in total wages than any other city manager in the Bay Area. Moniz made $357,099 in 2010 and $356,541 the year before in gross wages. The city paid $29,739 toward his pension.

Though Moniz took home a higher gross salary in 2010 than any of his Bay Area peers, he didn't make nearly as much in total compensation, according to the Bay Area News Group database.

Santa Clara City Manager Jennifer Sparancino made $373,099 in total compensation – $300,454 of that was her gross salary.

San Jose City Manager Debra Figone made $351,990 in total compensation – $276,684 in gross wages.

And Livermore City Manager Linda Barton made $350,999 total, $276,435 gross.

The city again cited HIPAA in declining a request by San Ramon Patch for the total compensation amount, including employer health-care contributions, for Moniz.

City Attorney Sheryl Schaffner also cited a 2007 California Supreme Court ruling that bars public employers from dishing out information on what types of benefits employees chose.

She submitted an excerpt from the International Federation of Profession and Technical Engineers v. Contra Costa Newspapers (2007) ruling:

Absent unusual circumstances, an employee's selection of benefits — such as the type of medical insurance, the number of family members covered, and the choice whether to obtain life or disability insurance — reveals information concerning the individual's personal life and financial decisions but little, if anything, about the operations of the government agency that would not be revealed by making public the types of benefits offered generally by the agency to its employees.

But details about the type of benefits Moniz selected were not requested – only a dollar amount of taxpayer funded health-care contributions.

Schaffner maintained that to disclose that would violate Moniz's privacy.