Brinker
Point of View
Tobin Brinker
Posted: 07/24/2012 03:23:34 PM PDT
Three cities San Bernardino could learn from are San Francisco, San Jose and San Diego. All three are older, larger charter cities. All three have dealt with the employee pension issue proactively as an effort to avoid bankruptcy.
The main idea is simple – employees must pay the employee share of pension costs.
San Francisco went first. It began a couple of years ago when the city public defender Jeff Adachi created a citizen initiative to reform public employee pensions. He gathered the signatures and his initiative came very close to passing. The San Francisco public employee unions had to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to defeat it. Adachi learned from that first battle and came back the next year with a new and improved initiative.
At that time, the newly appointed mayor of San Francisco, Ed Lee had just decided to run for the office and seized the opportunity. He reached out to the unions and convinced them that Adachi’s measure would pass this time unless the voters were given a better alternative. Mayor Lee worked with the unions to create a compromise measure that was not as draconian as Adachi’s measure. The voters liked the compromise measure better and San Francisco voted for real pension reform in November 2011.
Today the employees are paying the employee share on a sliding scale. The highest paid workers pay the whole employee share and lower paid employees pay a smaller share.
San Jose and San Diego went a different route. The unions have opposed reform in both those cities. Elected leaders and citizens gathered signatures to put pension reform on the ballot. It passed by large margins in both cities but the unions have now moved their battles to court. Citizens in those cities now wait to see if the courts will respect the will of the people and allow cities to regain control of their budgets or if they will have to go back to the table to find a solution.
Pension costs in San Bernardino have nearly doubled in the past six years. The combination of new benefits that allow employees to retire at age 50 with 90 percent pay for the rest of their lives, which was approved in early 2006, and the stock market crash in 2008 have pushed rates through the roof.
To read entire story, click here.
Tobin, was a deal made decades before you entered the picture to pay for retirement? Do you think Berdoo should offer a tiered settlement to bypass all those employees that have lived by their end of the contract for say 25 or more years? Or do you affirm the need to change the rules of the game right at the end for these city workers that tolerated bad bosses, asinine customers, difficult working conditions, only to be asked to give up and additional source of revenue?
Contribute to your pension or don’t. What does it matter? When the money is all gone no one will get anything, contract or no contract. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone. Unwillingness to deal with the problem now only guarantees that the retirement benefits you are counting on in the future will never be paid to you.
Unwilling:
You seem disappointed that you have to balance expectations with reality. Welcome to the club that currently has millions of members.
Nobody expected this recession, or the level to which the economy has fallen. Most others have made adjustments, but you and your union employees feel that you should not have to do so since it is not what you bargained for?
As to the “asinine customers” you have had to deal with, I can assure you that standing on the public side of the bureaucratic counter is not always a pleasant experience. Some of those who are now complaining that they are not getting what they bargained for are probably the same ones I have observed working in slow motion, exhibiting little if any interest in truly serving the customer, and leaving for lunch in mid sentence.
Also, “bad bosses” and “difficult working conditions” exist in the private sector as well.
The city council failed to put charter reform on ballot, they are broke, will continue to be insolvent without structural reform. That means salary, workforce and pension reform.
Several govts across the state are finding themselves unable to pay current pensions and unable to borrow money.
Penman is crafty he has become the agenda setter and policy leader, he is the Alexander Haig of the Morris Admin.
The city council is on course to fail even in bankruptcy. It will be unable to formulate a comprehensible plan. It will go to state control.
O of F, many other methods exist to balance budgets. The first of which, a prominent tool used in the private sector is called job cuts. You cant make payroll, you gotta lighten the load. Revenue drops, you cut staff, you cut hours until business picks up, or you make other temporary changes until business picks back up. YOu dont tell your staff time to sacrifice, work the same you have been working but for less than we used to pay without a light at the end of the tunnel. Oh, and it is ludicrous to purport that the public will suffer no loss of services. Granted San Bernardino is a huge example of incompetent administration, but there in lies the rub. The people that let this happen will go unscathed, while the real service providers (despite your broad brush with the government worker stereotype) take the fall. The employees to not propagate the bureaucracy, they implement it despite the ill will it causes. Oh, we are not in a recession so much as we are in an overspending crises. If we didn’t have to shovel so much money to liberal programs, elcted’s pet projects, and other non essential services, the scenario would be different.
Unwilling:
I agree with most of Comment #5, the final sentence in particular.
However, every time I have seen staff reductions in the private sector due to decreased revenues, the remiaing staff HAS had to pick up the slack, and has often accepted reduced compensation.
As to my “government worker stereotype,” I call them like I see them. I have worked with over 25 cities and counties in California and Nevada, and I have seen hundreds of their workers in action. I have not seen a single one work as hard as was necessary to remain employed at the Price Waterhouse downtown LA office in the 1970′s.
Perhaps if I saw a few bureaucrats exhibit the work ethic that is required to survive in the public sector I would be more compassionate. However, until then, when I hear them complain about having to start funding a portion of their pension, my sympathy is limited.
WA WA WA, all our problems are on account of giving to social programs, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with subsidizing developers and corporations to the tune of billions upon billions of dollars. Its the trickle down theory……..OOF, you call them like you see them????? you mean you call them the way you’re paid to see them.