Future officials at California’s fledgling stem cell research agency got a hefty raise this week.
The
board of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine approved a
top salary of $508,750 for the president and chair of the board. It
also approved raises for second-tier executives and the board’s vice
chair, who can earn as much as $332,000 a year. The agency’s top two
attorneys will make up to $277,500.
The 23% increases,
considerably smaller than staff recommendations, drew criticism not so
much for the dollar amounts, but for timing.
"I just don’t think
it was the right time to do this," John Simpson, stem cell project
director for the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights, told the Sacramento Bee. "It’s tone-deaf."
The
stem cell institute, financed by a $3 billion voter-approved
initiative, gets its money through the sale of bonds and is not
directly affected by California’s budget crisis.
Nonetheless, the move could build support for a measure recently introduced
in the Legislature that would charge the Little Hoover Commission with
investigating how CIRM’s governing body could be altered to eliminate
conflicts of interest.
That’s just one of several bills dealing
with CIRM that lawmakers in Sacramento have before them, in addition to
a number of other health care-related measures.
