Elected officials must take action on pension crisis

When several pension and benefit reform measures were approved by voters in 2012, there was at least a sliver of hope that public agencies would be forced to come to grips with and hopefully solve an underfunding problem.

Paying the ever increasing cost of public employee fringe benefits forces local and state governments in California to allocate more and of their dwindling tax dollars to pensions.

Cutting back on essential services or raising taxes, or both, are the consequence. That sliver of hope is fading.

Legislative reform in Sacramento and voter-supported changes in San Diego and elsewhere are being challenged in court. That comes as no surprise.

In San Diego, it was a promise unions made when the matter was added to San Diego’s ballot via a signature gathering campaign.

One of the first rulings attends to the San Diego reform. At the behest of San Diego’s public employee unions an administrative law judge with the Public Employment Relations Board, PERB, said the reforms should not be implemented because one of the backers was Mayor of San Diego at the time they were approved by voters.

The ALJ says the mayor, as the city’s chief negotiating official, had an obligation to negotiate elements of the proposal with the unions. According to the ALJ, his failure to do so invalidates the decision of the voters.

PERB, a board of citizens appointed by elected officials, is ruling against a majority of citizens who are in favor of the reforms. The citizens, of course, are the ones who pay the freight. That one is hard to rationalize.

City attorney Jan Goldsmith says the ALJ opinion will be appealed.

Baring a ruling staying its implementation, the reforms will be put in place. The changes apply to new employees. Thus far there has been no stay.

At the state level, various union groups are challenging decisions by county administrators as they attempt to implement the reform measures Gov. Jerry Brown pushed through the state Legislature.

Using that success as an argument, the governor was successful with another venture, one that increased the state’s sales tax and raised taxes on people with significant incomes.

The governor has, belatedly, directed California Attorney General Kamala Harris to defend the state law.

The arguments about the governor’s reform, in part, deal with what can be considered pensionable income. State and county employees get not only base pay, but additional compensation for various value added skills, such as the ability to speak more than one language and dexterity with electronic equipment.

County and other governmental bodies that are subject to the law want to limit the calculations for pensions to the base pay.

The most discouraging part of all this, however, is not the legal attacks -- that was to be expected. Any effort to weaken public employee union bargaining leverage or to take away what the unions now claim as their rights will be challenged.

The disappointment comes in the form of a bi-annual review by the San Diego County Taxpayers Association. The recently released study includes data for the seventeen cities in San Diego County that are part of the California Public Employees Retirement System.

Each of the 17 has a projected 2014 unfunded pension liability that is higher than the 2013 liability. The trend is in the wrong direction.

Public employee unions refuse to come to grips with having used their power to gain retirement benefit levels that dwarf those earned by most private sector workers.

Elected officials, thinking they are dependent on unions if they wish to stay in office are unable to stand up to their “benefactors.” That is pushing the problem to critical mass.

Add to the mix decisions like that of the PERB ALJ which reverse the few efforts made to slow the growth and we have a recipe for serious pain.

Elected officials who are responsible for California’s inexorable progress toward a financial conundrum -- that is, more and more taxes from fewer and fewer tax payers -- need to take note.

Neither Stockton nor Vallejo, both of which have used bankruptcy as a weapon against continuing unrealistic pension obligations for new employees, could make that formula work.

Hawkins is retired after 35 years as a construction industry association manager. He was a broadcast reporter and news anchor in Denver, Colo. As a Navy officer, he saw action in Vietnam in the River Assault Squadrons and is the recipient of a Silver Star and Purple Heart.