Sacramento Bee Chastises UC for Lavish Spending. The Sacramento Bee, in a strongly worded editorial on May 13, rebuked the University of California for lavish spending on administrative salaries.
According to The Bee:
"The current chancellor at UC Davis, Larry Vanderhoef, earns a base salary of $315,000 a year. The just-named new chancellor, Linda Katehi, will earn a great deal more, $400,000. She also will get a $100,000 relocation allowance, moving costs, a car allowance of almost $9,000 a year and free housing.
"On top of Katehi's pay is a generous package for Vanderhoef, who is returning to the faculty. He will take a one-year sabbatical to develop a biology course and write a book about UC Davis.
"Administrative salaries have become so much higher than faculty salaries that administrators find it difficult to return to teaching after an administrative stint. So instead of giving Vanderhoef a faculty sabbatical salary in his year off, UC will give him his executive salary of $315,000 (plus an office and travel budget of $39,000 and an assistant)."
The editorial concluded: "The Board of Regents needs to step up and establish a pay structure that serves the state's interest in strong academic institutions, not the personal financial interests of administrators. UC executive pay is the next bubble that needs to burst in California." (Source: The Sacramento Bee, May 13.)
Los Angeles Unified Policy to Dictate What Students Eat Is a Failure. It comes as no surprise that an effort by Los Angeles Unified School District to tell students what they should eat is a failure. An audit released May 5 by the district's inspector general found that a school policy to restrict student access to certain foods was a dud, as "most schools were not in compliance with the LAUSD's (2002) Motions to Promote Healthy Beverage Sales and Obesity Prevention." The audit team visited 70 schools sites to gather data. (Source: Los Angeles Unified School District, Office of the Inspector General.)
Caltrans Steered
$29 Million in Contracts to Former Employee's Firm. The Los Angeles Times reports:
"State transportation officials steered $29 million in contracts to a
company at which one of their former colleagues is an executive, raising
questions about favoritism in the purchasing process, according to a
legislative report." The contracts involved the purchase of
traffic-counting devices built with technology that the California Department
of Transportation helped develop. At a legislative committee hearing, lawmakers
discussed Caltrans e-mails illustrating an effort by an executive to pressure
local district offices to purchase items from the former colleague's business,
and to discourage them from considering other suppliers. Caltrans says no laws
were broken, but officials said they will make changes to add independent
oversight to the contracting process. (Source: Los Angeles Times, May
13.)
Cal-Taxletter, May 15, 2009
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