Senate legislation intended to require more public disclosure by Pennsylvania’s four state-related universities would, as currently written, enable those schools to shield from the public many of their largest employee salaries — figures they currently release.
Senate Bill 412, introduced this month by state Sen. John Blake, D-Lackawanna, is part of an ongoing effort to revamp Pennsylvania’s Right-to-Know Law that has been working its way through the Legislature for two years.
Mr. Blake said his bill’s intent is to give the public greater insight into the workings of the University of Pittsburgh, Penn State University and Temple and Lincoln universities, which receive hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars each year but are largely exempt from Right-to-Know requirements.
Indeed, his bill (explore below) would create free accessible online databases with extensive budgetary information, non-personal employee and enrollment data, and would compel the four universities to list vendor contracts above $5,000 and maintain a 20-year archive of minutes from school trustee meetings.
But in one key area of disclosure — individual salaries — the bill’s language appears to be at least a partial retreat.
Under the current Right-to-Know Law, last updated in 2008, the four state-related universities must provide annually any information required by the federal tax form 990 plus a list of their 25 largest employee salaries.
Under the legislation, Lincoln’s salary reporting requirement would not change, but Pitt, Penn State and Temple’s would. Those schools would list the highest-paid 200 employees, but salary data for faculty would not be reported as a specific amount, but rather in salary ranges.
The impact of that change could be significant based on a review of what those schools reported under Right-to-Know last year.
At Penn State, for instance, it appears 14 of the 25 employees whose salaries exceeding $500,000 were disclosed could have been reported in salary ranges had Senate bill 412 been in force. That’s because they hold faculty appointments and are not officers, directors, key employees or others whose compensation triggers federal reporting rules.
At Pitt, it appears that 17 of the 25 highest salaried employees earning $336,116 and up also could have been reported in salary ranges.
Mr. Blake, in an interview, acknowledged that things have changed substantially since 2012 when public anger over the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse scandal at Penn State fueled legislative momentum to bring the state-related schools fully under Right-to-Know.
“My original legislation would have called these institutions out as state agencies,” he said. “I ended up having to retreat from that.”
He said he sees the salary ranges as a balance between greater transparency and concerns expressed by the universities that disclosing salaries puts them at a disadvantage in recruiting and retaining talent. He added, “I would be willing to consider an argument to the contrary.”
Either way, he said, the public would have access to information never before available from those institutions. Late this afternoon, an aide to the senator called back to emphasize that “there is always the possibility for further refinement, specifically on salary ranges.”
Open government advocates have said the schools’ salary concerns do not take into account that competing public universities outside Pennsylvania generally must disclose their salaries under their own states’ Right-to-Know laws.
In Hawaii, public salaries are reported in ranges, but generally across the nation, public salaries including those of public university employees are disclosed to the dollar, said Adam Marshall, a legal fellow with the Washington D.C.-based Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
He said the rationale is that at government-funded instituations, “taxpayers have a right to know how money is being spent.”
He said gender disparity can be greatest at top income levels, and exact salaries enable better comparisons to see if men and women with comparable qualifications receive similar pay.
Lisa Powers, a Penn State spokeswoman, said today that salary ranges “give us a minimal degree of opaqueness” to safeguard against poaching of “our best faculty talent” who bring research funding into Pennsylvania. She said Penn State also considers private institutions as its competitors.
Pitt did not respond to an inquiry about salary ranges.
Language mandating disclosure of the top 200 campus salaries surfaced in June — initially without salary ranges for faculty — in predecessor legislation, Senate bill 444, sponsored by then Majority Leader Dominic Pileggi, R-Delaware, author of the current Right-to-Know law. A news release that month called the bill a dramatic expansion of state-related reporting requirements and mentioned the 200-salary requirement.
But three months later, salary range language was inserted into the bill just before it passed the Senate in an amendment introduced by Mr. Pileggi. That language was incorporated into the Blake bill. Erik Arneson, a Pileggi aide, acknowledged late Wednesday that the effect of the current wording does appear to lessen disclosure of individual salary amounts.
He said he would think that at minimum the top 25 should still be reported by amount.
“There never was any discussion about wanting to in any way scale back from what is already being provided,” he told he Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “My off-the-cuff reaction is it was an oversight that is easily remedied.”
Mr. Blake said he believes the history of state-related schools and higher threshold required for them to obtain legislative aid makes it harder to view them as state agencies. Also, in the case, of Sandusky, the senator said he believes had Penn State been treated as a state agency it would have enjoyed “sovereign immunity” limiting legal claims by Sandusky’s victims to $250,000 per occurrence or $1 million in aggregate.
As it was, Penn State in 2013 agreed to pay $59.7 million to settle claims by 26 children abused by the now imprisoned former assistant football coach.
Mr. Blake could not say what the salary ranges would be, though he said he did not expect them to be wide.
Melissa Melewsky, media law counsel with the Pennsylvania News Media Association, said she believes the bill’s intent overall is to bolster public access but said the salary range is a concern, especially since it is not specified. The objective “is a good thing,” she said. “Whether the language could be clearer is a different thing.”
SENATE BILL 412
Bill Schackner: bschackner@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1977 and on Twitter: @BschacknerPG.
First Published: February 25, 2015, 11:16 p.m.
Updated: February 26, 2015, 1:12 a.m.