[quote=pri_dk][quote=no_such_reality]Look at Vallejo and Stockton. San Jose. CalPERs strong armed Vallejo. The retirement benefits were largely protected. All the rest of the city services where largely stripped. Is that what the city government workers are fighting to get? Their pension at the cost of the entire city?[/quote]
All the evidence points to “yes.”
Protect the income of those who are not even working, at the expense of everything else.
In the pages and pages posts here by CAR and and BG, with thousands of words of cut/paste details, there is not a single mention of what happened to these cities.
Pure denial.
“Talk about everything but the actual issue. Just pretend it never happened. Just pretend it is not happening still.
Our union reps wrote the laws in a backroom deal. Now the law protects my income! Schools, services and the citizens be damned…”[/quote]
pri_dk and nsr:
First of all, I haven’t “cut and pasted” anything here OR written pages and pages about this subject. No offense to any other Pigg, but I don’t need to as I have a near-photographic memory of the “street view.”
Secondly, unions don’t write or make laws. Your elected officials do.
The exorbitant pension obligation shortfalls you are seeing in some CA counties and municipalities (incl the City of SD) is NOT due to old formulas used to calculate the more paltry annuites paid to those former employees who retired (or took deferred retirement) before 2002 and are still alive to collect them. It is due to later supervisor and council votes in each jurisdiction which allowed existing employees (incl the “voters,” lol) to “enhance” their retirement benefits in the following ways: (a) by paying in a larger portion of their biweekly pay into their respective (ret) systems; (b) for those eligible to retire, “bank” their pensions and still stay on the payroll (DROP), and (c) count overtime into the employees’ highest one-year pay or three-years pay for pension calculation purposes (“pension spiking,” now mostly rescinded everywhere).
How did these brilliant ideas come about and why were these votes for “enhanced” systems made?? I’ll tell you why:
By about 2001, in CA jurisdictions which still had open space to build, cities and counties were flush with developer fees and the additional property tax which resulted from subdividing that vacant land. Their retirement systems’ investments had been doing well in the stock market tech run up. At this time, it was not known that health care premiums would double and triple within the next decade as they had been staying the same or going up a few dollars (if anything) in previous years. In any case, the “enhanced pension” promises were later made to their respective union bargaining units by each jurisdiction without a guaranteed healthcare subsidy, to cover themselves in this regard.
In the case of the County of SD, the supervisor vote for the “enhanced pension” occurred in March 2002 and was subsequently offered as a “carrot” by the county to its unions beginning June 2002 (in lieu of their traditional 4-5% annual raises). The union reps, of course, took the offer after it was explained to their members.
btw, those supervisors who voted in the “enhanced” SD County pension formulas? Having no term limits, all five are still at their posts today and have been for the last 18-20 years. Ask yourself why this is so.
We all know what happened next. Developer-fee collection and property-tax collection went thru the roof in CA!! Some jurisdictions doubled and then tripled their planning dept staffs (only to later lay nearly all of them off). Even after the state confiscated their (Teeter) portion of the property taxes and the portion to fund courts and prisons (AB-233 funds), these “developing” municipalities and counties still felt rich!! In addition, MR bonds were paying for roads, libraries and new fire and police stns (which required new hires), but counties still collected the underlying (Prop 13) portion of each *new* parcel! This was a windfall to local jurisdictions!! Some of their retirement associations invested pension-obligations in what later proved to be worthless (MBS and derivative) hedge funds which ended up depleting their reserves they had set aside for projected pension obligations. The fund mgrs who made those risky investments were summarily sh!tcanned but that didn’t bring back the lost $$.
You might surmise that I should be “angry” or “envious” that I didn’t hang around long enough to receive an “enhanced” pension but I’m not. I didn’t have the payroll deductions for it taken from my pay. And if I become very sick or disabled in the future and/or Medicare becomes insolvent before I turn 65, I am guaranteed health coverage for life (at a huge cost to me), but it is there and is NOT underwritten. (I currently have an HDHP which has a $5K annual deductible and an $8K in annual coinsurance provision.) The retirees on the “enhanced” plan don’t have a HC guarantee and don’t have the small HC subsidy that we do.
I’ve personally served multiple stints at that (collective bargaining) table (even overnights) and can tell you that this experience was very enlightening, to say the least. It takes two to tango in there.I accept reality and know that collective bargaining is deeply imbedded in state law. It is what it is and these jobs are what they are. Everybody in there is on the same page in that regard. And that’s where the similarity parts ways.
What does this all boil down to? In a nutshell, there are two causes of CA city/county insolvency . . . well three, if you count Pollyanna-ish supervisors/council members. “Urban sprawl” is the (underlying) culprit…. and the success of “urban sprawl” was fueled primarily by easy money during the “millenium boom.”
In CA, these “enhanced” pensions would have never been voted in by the PTB had it not been for the infusion of massive developer fees and new and future property taxes to collect on endless new parcels that were permitted on previous wasteland.
“Urban sprawl” in CA had (and has) much more “far-reaching ramifications” than its residents are willing to admit. It has devastated many counties in this state. It is, truly, California’s “elephant in the room.”
Name me ONE city or county in this state who is on the verge of BK (on acct of an insolvent pension system) who did NOT succumb to the developer-fee and MR-bond enticement in the last decade or had and has their precious “open space” locked up from further development.
