… an auto allowance of $7,200 a year plus a mileage reimbursement for most trips at 57.5 cents a mile. … An independent committee that reviewed supervisors’ compensation found none of the other comparable counties it surveyed allowed such double-dipping. The committee recommended ending the mileage reimbursement except for travel out of county.

 

The committee’s position was buttressed by county calculations showing the auto allowance alone covers the costs of operating a car for county business, even for Piepho, the supervisor with the most mileage.

 

Nevertheless, supervisors decided to keep the auto allowance and mileage reimbursement for trips outside their own districts. In Piepho’s case, she will keep almost the entire mileage allowance.

 

Based on her 2014 travel expenses, 93 percent of her trips have been to destinations outside her district. So the board’s decision means that she will retain mileage reimbursement of about $4,400 a year. Under the committee’s recommendation, it would have been trimmed to about $1,580.

Board sparked furor with its big pay raise

This sort of controversy is nothing new to the 1.05 million residents of Contra Costa County, located due east of the Bay Area. Last October, supervisors faced a public backlash after voting themselves a big raise. This account is from the Contra Costa Times:

MARTINEZ — After giving most of their employees raises of about 4 percent in contract negotiations this year, Contra Costa supervisors Tuesday decided they deserved something more: a 33 percent hike, boosting their annual salaries to more than $129,000 a year.

By a 4-1 vote, the supervisor salaries will now be permanently tied to those of Superior Court judges, which is a common practice among county boards throughout the state and eliminates the need for the elected bodies to vote themselves an unpopular pay bump.

 

In Contra Costa, the salaries are now set at 70 percent of judicial salaries …

 

The Richmond Confidential website placed this pay scale in context:

 

“[The] new salary structure gives Contra Costa County’s board more money than the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco, San Mateo and Marin counties. It’s also higher than those of California state Senate and Assembly members, who make a base salary of about $90,000. …”

Backlash leads to reduction in salary boost

But after critics quickly rounded up 40,000 signatures opposing the pay hike, the supervisors voted in January to rescind the entire raise. Last month, they approved a plan in which their salaries would go up in phases by a total of 20 percent, to $116,840, with the final increase on Jan. 1, 2018.

The controversy could haunt the political futures of some of the supervisors, particularly Mary Piepho, the ambitious daughter of former state Sen. John Nejedly, who is now deceased. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Chip Johnson, who normally doesn’t pay much attention to Bay Area bedroom communities, lampooned Piepho in January for insisting that the $33,000 pay hike was a “salary adjustment,” not a raise.

But this ridicule didn’t stop Piepho from leading the push to have Contra Costa supervisors get both a flat vehicle reimbursement and a per-mile repayment.

“Today, the largest companies coming out of Silicon Valley no longer exclusively target greenfield territory. Take some of the highest valuation companies from the past year, such as Airbnb and Uber. These companies are not operating in empty space, but rather against significant entrenched non-technology businesses. This is a first for Silicon Valley, and it is the start of something fundamental – we are not just creating whole new categories, but reconfiguring non-technology ones as well.

“This new type of disruption is far more pernicious and far more political to boot. Silicon Valley still believes that it exists in a creation world, where it builds new things that create exclusively positive value. That has been a fair assessment historically, but that is no longer the case. Today’s companies are increasingly destroying the value of existing companies to create the next generation of products and services. We can argue whether the end result is a net benefit to society, but we cannot avoid the immediate impact our work has on the rest of the country anymore. …

“[Silicon Valley startups have] almost always been bolstered by positive media coverage and a general sense from policymakers that what we did was fundamentally good. Now that the Valley’s companies are increasingly competing against traditional businesses, society is not so quick to give us a pass on this behavior. Take Airbnb and Uber again, both of which have attempted to avoid regulations and taxes in their fields (hotel taxes and taxi and license commission regulations, respectively).”

Social issues not a helpful focus

Given that Silicon Valley is by far the greatest creator of wealth in California, the political implications of the backlash it’s facing are something that the Republican Party should think about.

The tech world already has a libertarian impulse. It hates the “you didn’t built that” mentality of liberals; it can barely hide its contempt for the increasing complaints from the left that a lack of “diversity” is a big problem in IT firms, which are as meritocratic as it gets. The techies I know express disbelief that anyone — read, Democrats — believes government should guide and/or dominate the economy.

If the California GOP can position itself as a pro-free market, pro-entrepreneur defender of Silicon Valley against unfair critics, the party could benefit for decades to come. Tech political power is going to keep getting bigger and bigger.

If Republicans want to take advantage of this, focusing on culture wars and hot-button social issues is the absolute wrong thing to do. Instead, they should celebrate and stick up for the state’s most transformative businesses and their workers.