A consent agenda item for the March 28 San Benito County Board of Supervisors’ meeting that could have gone all but unnoticed but for Suzy Caston resulted in an increase in pay of approximately $22,000 for County Administrative Officer Ray Espinosa. Caston is a county employee and president of the local chapter of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Chapter 521. She said the union opposed the raise.
“The SEIU members balanced the county’s budget on their backs for the last eight years,” she claimed, “and to see an increase of more than $44,000 (on March 31, Valdez corrected the amount to $22k) immediately for the CAO position, and then another increase on completion of a degree, is not acceptable at this time.”
Caston said Espinosa’s raise would reduce the salary and title of another potential county employee position. The raise, she added, would be disrespectful to county’s workers who have sacrificed and face losing salaries for the sake of providing services to the community.
“Many of the county’s workforce have vacant positions that are critical to public needs,” she continued. “This item only shows that you value high-priced management positions and have a deep pocket as you prepare to go into negotiations with your various units, including our membership.”
Caston said the union membership has collaborated with the county to rein in increased costs for health care and that the increase in pay for Espinosa was ill-timed.
“We’ve been hearing about the need for additional funds for road repairs and other priority issues, which are directly associated with the lack of oversight in this department” she said, “and that falls on the leadership in this county.”
The union, Caston said, asked the board to hear the community that relies on the direct public services of county workers and not focus only on management who “sit in the main offices behind desks.”
She asked the board to table the pay raise agenda item and instead focus on the department head position for the Human Resources Department, which she said has been headed by a consulting firm for the past four years. She said the HR position is possibly more important than taking care of the rest of the county’s employees over the long-term.
Supervisor and board chairman Jaime De La Cruz responded that while the board values the importance of the county’s rank-and-file employees, and appreciates the fact that negotiations with the union were coming up, what was at stake was keeping Espinosa.
“I have attended a couple conferences and I can tell you there’s a high demand for quality people like Ray Espinosa,” De La Cruz said. “They’d offer him $300,000 a year salary. If we don’t do anything today and deny today’s item, in six months we might be looking at hiring someone else and it’s going to be more expensive than what we’re about to pay today.”
De La Cruz said he supported the agenda item because Espinosa can take a leadership role for the next five to 10 years.
“We’re (board members) not going to be here in five or six years, but Ray will most likely be here,” he said. “I have trust in Ray that he’s going to make sure the county is in the right place. And, yes, there are some other issues that we need to fix as a board, but we will take care of those as time moves on. But, today, I feel 100 percent in support of Ray’s raise.”
None of the other supervisors commented and the item was passed unanimously.
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