Fullerton City Council should put proposed 25% pension boost on the agenda for discussion
By Jack Dean
August is the favorite month of the year for public employee unions everywhere because voters are away on vacation or otherwise pre-occupied. And this year it’s even better for them, what with the added distraction of the Olympics being broadcast in mesmerizing HDTV over a two-week period. What better time to launch a sneak attack on the local treasury and boost pensions?
So I should not have been surprised to learn that a proposal is before the Fullerton City Council to increase the employee pension formula from “2.0-at-55” to “2.5-at-55” — a factor of 25%.
No, seriously, I mean it — I should not have been surprised. No taxpayer should have to be surprised. A major change like this — which dramatically increases liability and is irreversible to boot — should not be sprung on citizens after the fact, which is apparently what was going to happen here.
Yesterday on the Orange County Register‘s blog, editorial writer Steve Greenhut reported that Fullerton council member Shawn Nelson plans to recruit a legislator to sponsor a bill to amend the Brown Act to eliminate such surprises in the future:
Nelson wants to find a legislative sponsor for a bill that would require cities to at least tell the public when they are negotiating for pension increases with public employees. The agenda item in the Fullerton closed session simply mentions contract negotiations, and the pro-pension-spike council members and city staff have done all they can do to stealthily increase these benefits.
Secrecy surrounding pay negotiations has been a recurring theme of late in California. Editorial writer Daniel Borenstein wrote an excellent column in the Contra Costa Times in June in which he called for more transparency:
For starters, there is no good reason for the secrecy surrounding salary negotiations. The most-often-cited excuse is that opening bargaining to public observation would cause participants to grandstand or harden their positions. I suspect there might be a bit of that. But, under the current arrangement, union leaders meet with negotiators representing elected officials, who depend on many of those same unions for campaign contributions. In other words, it sometimes seems that they are all on the same side of the negotiating table. It is in neither party’s interest to expose the discussions to public review, but it probably is in the taxpayers’ interest to watch.
Borenstein touched on how this issue may have contributed to the bankruptcy of the city of Vallejo in northern California, as did Peter Scheer, executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, in an op-ed in the Register in May:
Vallejo is broke, and other cities and counties may be close behind, because their personnel costs — salary and benefits for current employees and retirees — are higher than they can afford. While decisions at the state level are partly to blame, ultimate responsibility for the mismatch of revenue and expenses rests with local elected officials who, meeting in secret, have managed to avoid public discussion of the true cost and fiscal impact of the pay deals that they have approved.
If no one is watching, it’s easy for public officials to give generous pay and benefit increases without having a clue how to pay for them. That’s not so easy to do in a public session, where voters demand to know how much taxes will have to be raised, and how much other expenses cut, in order to make good on the promised increases in compensation. Such resistance is called political accountability, and it obviously depends on public access to the meetings in which elected representatives make their decisions.
The Sacramento Bee used Scheer’s column as the basis for an editorial in which it also called for updating the Brown Act:
The state’s Brown Act not only allows negotiations about salaries and benefits to be conducted behind closed doors, it allows local government officials to vote on a final agreement in closed session. Only after that vote and union acceptance of the contract does the local government have to let the public in on the deal. And only then does the text of the contract become a public record — when it’s too late to change anything.
… At a minimum, legislators should require local governments, before any vote, to publish a proposed contract and prepare a single, authoritative, easy-to-read document listing all parts of the offer, including cost. They also should require local governments to hold a public hearing to consider the financial ramifications of every labor agreement. The vote to approve or reject the contract should be held in public session.
In an editorial this past Tuesday, the Register called on the Fullerton City Council to put this proposed 25% pension increase on an upcoming meeting agenda for discussion. We second that motion. Let the people who are going to have to pay have a say.
Jack Dean is the editor of PensionTsunami.com.