Chairman of $3 Billion California Stem Cell Effort Up for Evaluation Next Week

One week from today, a select panel of the directors of the $3 billion California stem cell agency will meet for the first time to assess the performance of its chairman, Jonathan Thomas, during his nearly four years in office.

Thomas, a Los Angeles bond financier, was elected as chairman of the agency in June 2011 on a 14-11 vote of the 29-member agency board. (See here and here.) He is paid $400,000 annually for his part-time work (80 percent), according to a Sacramento Bee database. His salary has remained unchanged since he took office.

Left to right, Robert Klein, Art Torres and Jonathan Thomas (2009 photo)

Thomas succeeded Robert Klein as chairman of the agency. Klein was elected in December 2004 after shepherding the ballot campaign that year to pass Proposition 71, which created the agency and funded it with state government borrowing.

The agenda for next week’s meeting gave no clue to the reason for calling this particular evaluation session. But good personnel practices would seem to require regular evaluations, perhaps even more often than every four years.

In 2012, then outside counsel to the board, James Harrison, prepared a memo for the subcommittee discussing evaluation procedures. In the memo, Harrison, now general counsel to the agency but still an independent contractor, summarized procedures that called for Thomas to submit his job goals for 2012-13.

Also to be evaluated, according to the memo,  was Art Torres, vice chairman of the board. Torres was also elected by the board and works part-time (80 percent) at an annual salary of $225,000. The subcommittee has not scheduled a meeting to evaluate Torres’ performance. Torres has been paid $225,000 annually during the last two years. However, his pay ran up to $247,000 in 2012, $239,000 in 2011 and $230,000 in 2010, according to The Bee database, which is drawn from public records.

(In response to a question, the stem cell agency said later today that the money paid to Torres in those three years was for unused vacation time. Earlier versions of this item did not contain that response.)

The Evaluation Subcommittee has six members, including Thomas and Torres. However, Thomas is not likely to be sitting in on his own evaluation next week. Chairman of the panel is Francisco Prieto, a Sacramento physician. The others are Stephen Juelsgaard, former executive vice president of Genentech; Sherry Lansing, former head of a Hollywood studio and a University of California regent, and Jeff Sheehy, a communications manager at UC San Francisco.

The subcommittee has met six times since Thomas was elected. All of those meetings dealt with assessment of Alan Trounson, former president of the stem cell agency, according to agendas.

Next Friday’s meeting will be almost entirely behind closed doors, but the public does have an opportunity to comment.  Two locations for the public exist in San Francisco and one each in Los Angeles, Calistoga and Napa. Specific addresses can be found on the agenda.

CIRM Directors Judge Klein's Performance This Week

Directors of the California stem cell agency on Thursday will formally evaluate the performance of its chairman, Robert Klein, for the first time in five years.

Klein has headed the $3 billion agency since its inception, on a vote of its 29-member board of directors in December 2004. Initially, Klein, a wealthy Palo Alto real estate investment banker, took no salary and testified in court that he did not consider himself a state employee. However, he asked for compensation in 2008. The board agreed to give him $150,000 annually for what it defined as a half-time job.

Earlier this year, the directors' Evaluation Subcommittee held its first meeting to come up with procedures for evaluating Klein, the two vice chairmen,(Art Torres and Duane Roth) and CIRM President Alan Trounson. The transcript of that session can be found here.

While Klein has not had a formal evaluation during his tenure, directors discussed his performance  during the closed-door session in which they set his salary. Publicly, directors are generally effusive in their praise of Klein. Privately, some are not entirely happy. But it is clear that Klein has been the dominant force – which is probably an understatement – at CIRM since 2004.

Thursday's two-hour Evaluation teleconference meeting will begin with a public session, but is expected to promptly go into a closed-door session to deal with personnel matters(Klein's evaluation), a normal procedure permitted under state law. Following the executive session, the subcommittee is expected to reconvene and report any action that may have been taken.

Klein is a member of the Evaluation Subcommittee but is expected to recused from deliberations involving him.

CIRM Directors Take Up Evaluation of Top Management

How should CIRM Chairman Robert Klein be evaluated? How should the performance of Art Torres, co-vice chairman of the $3 billion effort, be assessed? What about President Alan Trounson?

These matters are being considered at the first-ever meeting of the CIRM directors Evaluation Subcommittee, which comes five years after the agency was created and Klein selected for his post. Friday's session could provide an unusual opportunity to peek inside the nitty-gritty of management of a chimeric enterprise that combines big business, big science, big academia and big politics.

Depending on the job, the evaluation process will include solicitation of written comments from the governor, treasurer, state controller, some recipients of CIRM funding, patient advocates, the biotech industry and “other stakeholders.”

Questions to be addressed, in Klein's case, include whether he

• Shows “comfort with and tolerance in managing diverse and conflicting opinions”
• Demonstrates “a record of effectively communicating CIRM’s mission and accomplishments to stakeholders and public”
• Works effectively with lawmakers to ensure on-going support of CIRM

One section on Klein's evaluation form deals with accountability. It asks whether he “effectively manages compliance with CIRM’s public accountability requirements, including (1) the annual public report (2) the independent financial audit; (3) the Citizens’ Financial Accountability Oversight Committee; (4) public meeting and records laws; (5) competitive bidding; (6) conflicts of interest; and (7) intellectual property standards.”

We should note that “compliance with...requirements” is rather minimal, just meeting what is needed by law. That standard does not, for example, reach Klein's oft-repeated assertion that CIRM adheres to the highest standards of openness and transparency. CIRM's accountability or lack of it has surfaced recently in news reports and in a statement by an influential state lawmaker, Sen. Elaine Kontominas Alquist, D-San Jose.

We should also note that state law that requires public sessions of some meetings of the directors Evaluation Subcommittee, including the one this week. However, the specific evaluation of the individuals will be private.

Klein, a Palo Alto real estate investment banker, initially declined a salary for the chairman's job, which has a pay range of $275,000 to $508,750. But in 2008, he said he would like to be paid. Directors approved $150,000 for what they specified was a half-time position.

Torres' job is also considered a part-time position; in his case, four days a week. In December, his salary was boosted from $75,000 for halftime work to the current $225,000. The range for the position fulltime is $180,000 to $332,000. Torres was formerly head of the state Democratic party and was a longtime state legislator.

The other co-chairman, Duane Roth, a San Diego area businessman, has declined a salary.

Trounson began work in January 2008 at a salary of $490,008. His job has the same range as that of the chairman.

Here are links to  the evaluation procedure and the evaluation forms for Klein and Trounson.

Evaluation of the vice chairmen is not specifically on the agenda but is mentioned in the committee's background information. More specifics are likely to surface at a later date and be colored by experience with evaluation of Klein and Trounson. Also to be considered later is the question of just how to evaluate an employee who is not being paid – Roth.

Teleconference locations for the meeting are available for public participation in India and throughout the state, including San Francisco, Los Angeles(2), Elk Grove, La Jolla, Pleasanton, Menlo Park and Emeryville.

All locations, including the one in India, must be open to the public by state law. CIRM has not responded to our question about which CIRM director is in India.

Specific addresses of the teleconference locations can be found on the meeting agenda. To avoid confusion at the time of the meeting, you may want to call CIRM in advance if you plan to attend one of the teleconference locations.