Patrick's Agency Review Overdue | Commission on salaries requests extension from Gov.
Stephen Crosby
More than 90 days since Gov. Deval Patrick ordered a public review of compensation of senior management salaries at all the state’s quasi-public agencies, the task is not complete.
The commission charged with performing the review within 90 days of March 24 was not fully formed until a month after Patrick’s order. Stephen Crosby, dean of the University of Massachusetts John W. McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies and leader of the review effort, has asked for an extension.
Recently, Crosby told the Worcester Business Journal that the review should be complete by the end of July.
Time Delay
Crosby said it was difficult to assemble a commission whose members had not done at least some business with one of the state’s 50 quasi-public agencies and were thus not conflicted.
As it stands, the commission has five members: Crosby, Brian Hall, a business administration professor at Harvard; Bud Moseley, vice president at Boston executive search firm Isaacson Miller; Giovanna Negretti, executive director of Oiste?, a Latino political organization, and Lucille Hicks, a former Republican state representative and senator from Wayland.
“It’s a big job, just a ton of stuff to pull together,” Crosby said.
The commission has sent extensive questionnaires to the quasi-public agencies and so far only two or three have not responded, Crosby said.
Patrick asked the agencies not to extend new employment contracts and to suspend scheduled pay raises until the commission files its report. The call for review came on the heels of criticism of the recommended $175,000 salary for Sen. Marian Walsh by the Health and Educational Facilities Authority.
Walsh agreed to cut her salary to $120,000 in an effort “to lead the reform at the agency and to generate savings,” according to Patrick’s office.
Since the call for review, the salaries of several top quasi-public executives have been reported. Susan Windham-Bannister, CEO of the year-old Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, makes $285,000, for example. Mitchell Adams, executive director of the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative, makes nearly $264,000.
Questions For Another Day
But while Patrick worried that the state’s quasi-public agencies are less accountable than true state agencies and more protected from the vagaries and risk of truly private enterprise, similarities between them are difficult to find, said Hicks.
And despite her curiosity about the accountability and effectiveness of quasi-public agencies and the appropriateness of the salaries they pay their top executives, Hicks said those questions are not within the commission’s purview.
“Those questions are interesting, but not part of our mandate,” he said. “Are (the executives) competent to execute their responsibilities should be the next question after we submit our report. That’s the question that’s in the public mind.”
Deciding what’s “appropriate and fair,” is made more difficult by the fact that quasi-public agencies offer a wide range of services. They also are funded in many different ways. Some are self-funded, others count on the federal or state government for funding.
But they may one day be much more similar.
Patrick made his call for the review of quasi-public salaries around the same time he called for the consolidation of the agencies and the elimination of the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority.
WBJ Web Partners
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments