San Luis Obispo County Grand Jury
• 2011-2012
• Agency Response
Response to:
Medical_Marijuana_Report
Receivedslo County Grand Jury May 9, 2012 Presiding Judge Barry T. LaBarbera Superior Court of California*
⚠️ Translation Notice: This content has been automatically translated. The original English text is the official version. Translation may contain errors.
⚠️ Este contenido ha sido traducido automáticamente. El texto original en inglés es la versión oficial. La traducción puede contener errores.
Note: Missing finding numbers detected: F3, F4, F5, F6, F7, F8, F9
Findings and Recommendations 3 findings
F1
Obispo County. The City agrees with the Grand Jury finding. Based on the information reported, all jurisdictions in San Luis Obispo County, including the City of San Luis Obispo, appear to have substantial unused accumulated vacation time.
Related Recommendations (1)
R1
All jurisdictions should review their accumulated vacation time and implement steps to address future accumulation and payment of vacation time. The City of San Luis Obispo's policies and practices related to accumulated vacation time were developed after negotiating in good faith with employees and are aimed at balancing employee's needs for flexibility in accumulating and taking vacation time with the City's desire to manage the liability. The City reviews all accumulated leave time, not just vacation accumulation, at least annually and works with employees to ensure compliance with the city's policies and various MOAs. As the Grand Jury notes and we agree, in the City of San Luis Obispo vacation time appears to be well managed.
F2
With the exception of the Cities of Grover Beach and Arroyo Grande, all jurisdictions in San Luis Obispo County allow unlimited accrual of sick leave. All jurisdictions but one, however, have a policy allowing the buy back or payoff of accumulated sick leave either annually or upon leaving city employment. The City of San Luis Obispo does allow unlimited accrual of sick leave. However, the City of San Luis Obispo does not pay out any sick leave to employees who leave city employment prior to retirement. The City does allow retiring employees to cash out a portion of their sick leave based on the applicable rules in place for their bargaining group.
Related Recommendations (1)
R2
All jurisdictions that do not update their personnel rules after implementing new Memorandums of Understanding should update their personnel rules to reflect current practices. The City of San Luis Obispo does not believe their Personnel Rules and Regulations are in conflict with the MOAs for represented employee groups. The Personnel Rules and Regulations apply to all City employees while an MOA applies to only the employees represented by that bargaining unit. Further, if there is a conflict between the Personnel Rules and Regulations and the MOA, the MOA prevails. As described under Finding 10 above, updating the Personnel Rules and Regulations requires the City to meet and confer with every represented employee group; a time consuming process that would be counter to the bargaining with a specific employee group that provided the impetus to updating the Personnel Rules and Regulations in the first place.
F10
Most jurisdictions do not update their personnel rules and regulations after MOUs are developed with each bargaining unit. All personnel rules are incorporated into any new MOUs, but personnel rules are not always updated accordingly. It is an accurate statement to say the City of San Luis Obispo does not update the Personnel Rules and Regulations after a memorandum of agreement (MOA) is approved after bargaining in good faith with a represented employee group. The reasoning behind this is because in order to change or update the Personnel Rules and Regulations the City must meet and confer (bargain) in good faith with all affected represented employee groups (conceivably the same group or groups that the City reached agreement with and thus initiated the update). Meeting and conferring with five represented employee groups can be Grand Jury Response time-consuming. Further, the Personnel Rules and Regulations are meant to provide City-wide guidance, while MOAs provide more specific detail on topics that may apply to a smaller segment of the City or of the represented employee group. If every MOA change was to be reflected in the Personnel Rules and Regulations, there wouldn't be a need for one or the other document.
Related Recommendations (1)
R10
All jurisdictions in the County should report annually to their citizens on the status of vacation and sick leave accumulations, and compare them with the prior year to demonstrate how they are addressing the unfunded liability issue. We agree that citizens should be informed of the status and dollar amount of the City's compensated absences annually. The City of San Luis Obispo's liabilities for all compensated absences (vacation, sick and compensatory time) are audited and reported each year in the City's Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR). Specifically, this information is contained in Note 7 to the CAFR, which discusses long- term debt and liabilities. The schedules in the CAFR provide information about the prior year liability, the amount the liability has increased and decreased during the fiscal year and the resulting ending liability balance. In addition, it provides an estimate for the amount of the liability that the City believes will be due within one year. Grand Jury Response The City of San Luis Obispo appreciates the efforts and findings by the Grand Jury; particularly that the City of San Luis Obispo is managing its accumulated vacation and sick leave balances extremely well. The City Council reviewed and approved this response at its regular meeting of May 8th, 2012. Respectfully submitted, Kathe Lichtig, City Manager
* This report's PDF did not contain easily extractable text and required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for analysis. There may be minor errors in the extracted findings and recommendations due to OCR limitations with scanned documents.