Community College Board OKs Administrators’ Raises

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

The district refused, however, to divulge just 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.

College presidents, who now earn between $76,479 and $94,744 a year, and most vice chancellors received 7% for 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 in favor of the increases, with Trustee Elizabeth Garfield in opposition, was taken at a meeting held at the new South Gate Educational Center, a satellite of East Los Angeles College.

Garfield opposed the increases because contract negotiations are incomplete with a few of the district’s unions; she said it would be unfair to reward top administrators before they had finished settling compensation with some of the employees.

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

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

“We were so far behind the majority of districts in the state, we weren’t able to catch up, even going as far as we did,” said Board of Trustees President Althea Baker in an interview.

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

The salary jumps, for the years 1996 through 1998, come at a time when the district’s campuses, including the three in the San Fernando Valley, have made deep cuts in their class offerings because of budget problems.

But Baker said the class cuts, determined campus-by-campus, arose from a separate board edict requiring the schools to live within their budgets, which required paying back the district for past overspending.

Pierce College in Woodland Hills, for instance, is working off a $4.8-million debt to the district.

Claiming the information was private, the district’s chief attorney, Camille A. Goulet, declined to provide precise salaries for district officials--even to the trustees.

The Times is contesting that decision based on a prior ruling in a separate case by an Orange County Superior Court judge that such information should be public.

The range of salaries for specific positions, information that was provided to the trustees, was not made available before Wednesday’s meeting. But a copy of the salary range information obtained by The Times shows that the vice chancellor for educational research could have earned as much as $98,969 before the raise, and that the district controller would have maxed out at $87,789.

In addition to the higher paid administrators, the raises approved Wednesday include those of other workers--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.

“I can’t compete in the marketplace,” Segura said. The employees would still be underpaid if they received “two or three times” the raises they got, he said.