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A state senator has called for a Senate Education Committee hearing to investigate the University of California’s compensation policies, which were called into question by a San Francisco Chronicle article earlier this month.

Sen. Abel Maldonado, R-Santa Maria, called the hearing because, as a public institution funded by taxpayers, the UC has a duty to be open with its spending and make the best use of state funds, said Tom Kise, Maldonado’s spokesman.

The Chronicle’s Nov. 13 article alleged the university paid its employees millions of dollars more over the last fiscal year than was disclosed in a consultant’s report on UC salaries in September.

The chair of the committee, Sen. Jack Scott, D-Pasadena, has not yet received the request because he is out of the country and so has not made a decision as to whether the committee will hold a hearing, said Wendy Gordon, Scott’s spokeswoman.

Kise said he was optimistic that Scott would agree to the hearing.

The Chronicle article reported that the university paid $871 million in various bonuses, about $599 million of which went to 8,500 employees. These figures were not released in a September report by Mercer Human Resources Consulting.

The report, which found salaries at the UC lagged behind comparable universities by 15 percent, was released by the UC and did not include various forms of compensation outside regular employees’ salaries.

For Maldonado, the problem is not only about the significant dollar amount, but also about general practices at the UC.

“It does not make sense to the senator that the someone who is making six figures ... is using the UC expense account to buy their colleague’s wife a bouquet of flowers,” Kise said.

After the Chronicle article, other news sources were quick to jump on the story, putting the UC’s salary practices in the spotlight across the state.

The UC, too, was quick to respond, defending many of the payments as one-time compensation packages and saying such spending was necessary to recruit quality officials. Within a day of the article’s publication, UC President Robert Dynes had set up a Web site to answer questions raised by the article.

In a statement posted on the site, Dynes said the Chronicle had “omitted or mischaracterized some important facts,” and at the November UC Board of Regents meeting he said a task force would be formed to increase transparency in the university’s practices.

Kise said Maldonado has called for a senate hearing in the hope of clarifying the conflicting reports that have been circulating.

“The idea of the hearing is to get to the bottom of what is being written about in various news articles, so we can have a clearing of the air and find out what is really happening here,” Kise said.

Questions about the UC’s openness were the central concern for Maldonado.

“One of the more troubling aspects of this issue for me is the appearance of a lack of transparency and disclosure that surround these compensation decisions,” Maldonado wrote in a letter to Scott dated Nov. 28.

In the letter, Maldonado also said the hearing would “give UC officials a public forum in which to better articulate these policies and practices.”

The current economic difficulties in the state make the UC’s high compensation packages all the more disconcerting, said Bruce Hamlett, chief consultant for the State Assembly Higher Education Committee.

“State resources are limited – why are we seeing so much going into offline salary enhancements for administrators?” Hamlett said.

Hamlett also questioned where the money for these large compensation packages was coming from.

“Student fees have gone up dramatically the past couple of years,” he said. “Is some of the money that’s generated from student fee revenue being used to fund these additional enhancements?”