Marin County Grand Jury
• 2024-2025
• Agency Response
Response to:
Cyberattacks: A Growing Threat to Marin Government
Follow-up Report on Web Transparency of Agency Compensation Practices*
⚠️ 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.
Findings and Recommendations 3 findings
F3
Any link to publicpay.ca.gov on an agency's website that fails to go directly to the agency's current compensation data on that website does not satisfy the intent of the Government Code that information be easily located. Disagree. By providing a link to the homepage for publicpay.ca.gov, interested individuals are able to view the various capabilities of the website including the "reports and tools" functions, the ability to compare compensation between agencies and the range of pay for job titles in the state, as well as subscribe to updates from the California State Comptroller. We are confident that the navigation on the publicpay.ca.gov homepage is intuitive for those with basic computer literacy and allows interested parties to easily locate information on the site.
Related Recommendations (1)
R3
No later than 90 days after the date of this report, agencies should modify their existing publicpay.ca.gov links so that they provide a direct link to their current compensation data on the state site. To eliminate the need for annual updates, the URL used for the link should exclude any parameter specifying a year. Formatted URL examples are shown on
F4
Regarding compensation policies for elected officials, many public agencies do not provide the public with easy access to information regarding salary, meeting fees or stipends (including compensation for serving as liaison to other advisory committees, councils and forums), reimbursements, health and retirement benefits, and other benefits such as equipment. Disagree. The City of Larkspur has no comment. The City Council lacks sufficient information to determine whether "many" public agencies match the description in this finding.
Related Recommendations (1)
R4
No later than 90 days after the date of this report, in addition to any other compensation links, agencies should include a link on their board or council web pages that leads directly to their "Elected Officials" page on the publicpay.ca.gov site, conforming to the format suggested on
F5
Regarding detailed disclosure of total compensation paid, most public agencies do not break out all components of compensation paid to their elected officials, including salary, meeting fees or stipends (including compensation for serving as liaison to other advisory committees, councils and forums), reimbursements, health and retirement benefits, and other benefits such as equipment. Disagree. The City of Larkspur has no comment. The City Council lacks sufficient information to determine whether "most" public agencies match the description in this finding.
Related Recommendations (1)
R5
No later than 120 days after the date of this report, agencies should include on their board or council web pages a comprehensive description of their policies regarding all compensation paid to elected officials specifying, at a minimum, salary, meeting fees or stipends (including compensation for serving as liaison to other advisory committees, councils and forums), reimbursements, health and retirement benefits, and other benefits such as equipment. This recommendation has not yet been implemented but will be at a future date. We believe that an interested party can easily find this information on the City's website (www.cityoflarkspur.org). However, in the interest of enhanced transparency, at a future meeting, the City Council will adopt a summary of its compensation practices for elected officials and post to the City Council page of the City website. This recommendation set a deadline of August 26, 2020. The section of the City's website pertaining to compensation is now compliant and provides the following: a link to the Larkspur Municipal Code sections concerning compensation to the Mayor and Members of the Council and a disclosure that the Mayor and Members of the City Council have the option to receive medical coverage and are reimbursed for out-of-pocket expenses pursuant to the same policies that govern employees. We do convey our disappoint that the Grand Jury fails in its report to note that Larkspur, as well as nine other cities in Marin County, are general law cities and our compensation practices are prescribed by the California Government Code.
* 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.