Marin County Grand Jury • 2024-2025 • Agency Response

Follow-up Report on Web Transparency of Agency Compensation Practices*

Published: April 28, 2020 5 pages
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Findings and Recommendations 6 findings

F1
Many Marin public agencies fail to include on their websites either a link to the publicpay.ca.gov site showing compensation for their elected officials, officers, and employees, or a table showing such data. The Grand Jury determined that these agencies fail to comply with the requirements of Government Code Section 53908.
Related Recommendations (1)
R1
To comply with the intent of Government Code Section 53908, no later than 90 days after the date of this report, agencies should include on their websites a link to the publicpay.ca.gov site showing compensation of their elected officials, officers, and employees using the formatted URL examples that are shown in Appendix A.
F2
Any link to compensation data on an agency's website that takes more than five minutes or three clicks from the home page to locate, does not reasonably satisfy the intent of the Government Code that the information be easily located and "conspicuous" on the agency's website.
Related Recommendations (1)
R2
No later than 90 days after the date of this report, agencies should modify the location of their existing publicpay.ca.gov links to satisfy the requirement of Government Code Section 53908 that their link be "conspicuous." Conspicuous locations for agencies are suggested in Table 2.
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.
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. Regarding detailed disclosure of total compensation paid, most public agencies do not
Related Recommendations (1)
R4
Completed on 5/5/20 Recommendations numbered ______R5-R6______ have not yet been implemented • but will be implemented in the future.
F5
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.
Related Recommendations (1)
R5
To be completed by August 2020.
F6
By comparison to other public agencies, Marin Municipal Water District annually publishes an exemplary report on its website of total compensation paid to its elected officials for 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.
Related Recommendations (1)
R6
To be completed by August 2020. Recommendations numbered _____N/A __ require further analysis. • Recommendations numbered _____N/A will not be implemented because they are • not warranted or are not reasonable. Signed:_/ Date: 5/24/2020 Marin Grand Jury Response Form

* 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.