Attorney general weighs in on meetings
Tennessee Attorney General Herbert Slatery III dirtied the shine on the $1.7 million in bonuses Erlanger Health System trustees decided in December to give hospital executives with his opinion Wednesday that the meeting in which the bonuses were discussed should have been an open and not a closed meeting.
State law, the opinion said, "would not permit the board of a public hospital that is subject to the Tennessee Open Meetings Act and Tennessee Public Records Act to meet in closed session to discuss executive compensation and executive bonuses."
Some board members have acknowledged the meeting in which the salaries were discussed was closed, but, if the hospital was only paying bonuses due to previously set benchmarks, as it has alleged, why was the meeting closed? If the matter was cut and dried, what needed to be shielded from public eyes?
Public hospitals are allowed, for the sake of competition, to discuss "marketing strategies and strategic plans" in private, but Slatery's opinion -- requested by several local legislators -- also made clear that executive compensation and executive bonuses were not a part of marketing strategies or strategic plans.
We believe the board knew that already but rolled the dice the matter would not be questioned. Trustees should have taken the high road and explained in the open that the bonuses were given based on benchmarks set a year ago. That route would have prevented a larger firestorm. Now, anything the board does in closed session will seem suspicious.
A year ago, Erlanger Health System was staring down a barrel of red ink, so its turnaround -- to have made $12.7 million in profit in its most recent quarter -- is quite remarkable and a testament to a number of sound strategies that have been implemented there by CEO Kevin Speigel and his executive team.
But after those strategies included phasing out pensions, cutting retiree health benefits and increasing employees' responsibility for health insurance -- not unlike many other businesses have done -- and having Hamilton County legislators go to bat for the hospital to tap into federal funds, the executive bonuses looked like a slap across the face to retirees and rank-and-file employees and have soured the legislative delegation on the hospital. The attorney general opinion's only made things worse.
Going forward, we hope the hospital will manage its spending and compensation strategies as carefully as we know it does its patient services.
For fairer NLRB
U.S. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., has co-sponsored a bill that will keep the National Labor Relations Board from being the partisan political tool it has become under President Barack Obama.
The bill, which was previously introduced last year but never allowed to come to the floor by then-Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., would increase the number of board members from five to six and require a split between Republicans and Democrats. Decisions, in turn, would require the agreement of four board members, resulting in a consensus.
It also, among other things, should speed up the board's decision-making. Currently, either party in a case before the board can appeal to a Federal Appeals Court if the board fails to reach a decision within a year. Under Alexander's bill, if the board is not able to decide 90 percent of its cases within one year over the first two-year period after the legislation is implemented, NLRB funding would be reduced by 20 percent.
"This legislation will turn the National Labor Relations Board from a partisan advocate to the neutral umpire it ought to be," said Alexander, "restoring stability to our nation's workplaces."
Currently, make-up of the board depends on the party of the president, but critics say under Obama it has overturned decades of precedent to emphasize union concerns.
Locally, it has been nothing but friendly, rather than impartial, to the United Auto Workers' effort to unionize Volkswagen in spite of the election almost a year ago in which workers voted down representation by the union.
We believe the legislation makes sense and hope the bill will, in time, receive a full airing on the Senate floor.
Close down closed primary talk
The executive committee of the Tennessee Republican Party plans to discuss a proposal next month that, if put into legislation, would close state primaries. In other words, Republicans only could vote in the Republican primary and Democrats in the Democratic primary. It's a bad idea that we hope never makes it to the legislative process.
Such legislation would, essentially, rob people of their choice at the ballot box. In elections where there are few if any contested races on one side of the ballot, it would prevent voters from that party from voting in the opposite primary for, say, the better of two candidates. It also basically disenfranchises independent voters because they don't feel comfortable throwing in for one party or the other.
Further, an open primary keeps a candidate more honest, knowing he or she can't be one thing to primary voters and another to general election voters. We hope the party doesn't allow that closed primary thought past the discussion stage.