In a marathon meeting that stretched into Thursday morning, the Long Beach Community College District Board of Trustees voted to approve a contract extension and pay raise for the interim superintendent-president it appointed just over 2 months ago.
The vote, which occurred just before 1 a.m., extends interim Superintendent-President Lou Anne Bynum’s contract into next year and increases her annual salary by $48,000. Her original contract paid her a total of $120,000 in salary and was set to expire in September. She’ll now make over $280,000 through the middle of March.
The vote to approve Bynum’s extension came hours after the board discussed the millions of dollars the school would be losing due to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s May revise of the state budget.
According to that presentation, LBCC is projected to lose over $14 million in revenue from the state. Other financial impacts brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic are still being evaluated.
The school also needs to negotiate 2 labor contracts in the coming months, but Trustee Doug Otto said that comparing the resources the board would have to spend on new labor contracts paled in comparison to the $48,000 raise for Bynum.
“That’s chump change, and we need not to worry about that,” Otto said.
Board President Vivian Malauulu tried to put off the pay raise and extension until the board’s next regular meeting in June despite saying that she thought Bynum was the right person for the job and the prospects of finding a full-time replacement before the fall were minimal.
However, Malauulu noted that the salaries of other college district leaders that were being cited as comparisons for Bynum were those of full-time heads of colleges, most of which had advanced degrees. The optics of approving the contract amendment Thursday “would not be good,” Malauulu said.
“Just as I believe that you are deserving, I equally believe that the faculty is deserving as well,” Malauulu said. “We can’t be hypocrites about it.”
Malauulu’s motion to table the vote until June did not gain any support from her colleagues.
Trustee Sunny Zia wanted to push any raise for Bynum back even further, saying that a potential raise or extension should be tied to a performance evaluation at the end of the original 6-month contract Bynum agreed to in March.
“I just think it sends the wrong message to give a 20% increase 2 months in,” Zia said. “We’re in a pandemic and there’s economic misery.”
Zia and Malauulu were the 2 dissenting votes against the contract amendment, which passed 3-2.
Bynum’s appointment was as tumultuous as her first few months leading the college, where she worked at for 20 years before retiring. She was appointed during an emergency Saturday night meeting in March, and her first major action as the leader of LBCC was to close down the campus because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
She must now lead the college through labor negotiations while the college looks to reduce costs because of a nearly $54 billion budget deficit at the state level that has already trickled down to education institutions across California.
As she urged the board to vote for her extension and raise, Bynum noted these extreme circumstances and said that her current salary was only about $700 more per month than what she made while working at the college prior to retiring.
“I understand this is a really really hard time,” Bynum said. “If we had to pick a time for this topic to come up we probably couldn’t have picked a worse time.”
The vote to approve Bynum’s raise was originally set to be acted on during the course of the regular meeting, but it happened so late at night because it was postponed at the request of Trustee Uduak-Joe Ntuk, who said that the board had yet to wrap up closed-session contract negotiations that prevented it from voting on the open-session item.
The board opted to push the vote to the very end of the meeting, with lasted more than 7 hours and stretched into Thursday morning.
Trustees adjourned before midnight to comply with state open meeting laws before reconvening just after midnight to head back into closed session again.
It then emerged from closed session a 3rd time just before 12:30 a.m.; it briefly discussed the merits of the extension before eventually approving it.