Elected officials have been very generous in their pension payouts, especially for top managers and public safety employees. The problem is these pensions are unsustainable and then out leaders claim they don;t have enough money to keep parks open, or pay for police officers and firefighters. They act as if there is no cost to handing out pensions.
The Fresno Bee editorial board discusses the issue in this editorial.
A pension watchdog group has looked into all the pensions paid to public employees that are over $100,000 a year. The group found that at least 32 state and local government retirees in the central San Joaquin Valley earn more than $100,000 in annual pension pay. They include Jan Reynolds, a former Hanford city manager, $153,036; Jim Zulim, a former Clovis police chief, $114,399; George Sandoval, a former Visalia fire chief, $112,959; Bill Drennen, a former Lindsay city manager, $111,281.
The highest paid public employee retiree in the state is Bruce Malkenhorst, the former city administrator, clerk, finance director and treasurer of the city of Vernon. Vernon is a tiny industrial enclave near Los Angeles. He earns an annual pension of $499,674.84.
The California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility put together a proposal for an initiative in 2007 that would have raised retirement to 55 for public safety personnel and 65 for all others as well as using the average of 3 years for the base and not just the last year of salary. Unfortunately, it couldn't get the funding it needed for ballot signatures.
Maybe now the time is right.
What gets me is that Congress will play around with Social Security for the private retirees but is sworn to "honor" union contracts with these exhorbitant pensions.
We all know who really runs our government.
Example: In Clovis, two of the Council members had themselves elected by supporting a lucrative retirement/pension program. The consensus had been that the City just could not afford it. The City had made a very reasonable counteroffer, but it was rejected. Now some years after that fateful election, those two City Council members cry ach and alas for the Clovis budget. And those pension recipients are able to retire young enough to stay in the same line of work at a different locale, making them double dippers. And I am sure that the Clovis scenario repeats itself over and over again in communities from the Oregon border down to the Mexican border. Democracy in any form cannot be sustained without constant citizen vigilance and participation. Without it democracy becomes subject to government and bureaucratic exploitation. Patriotic flag-waving is no substitute for active involvement. A beehive blogger seems to remember bad conduct on my part. Yes, I testified in opposition to many council agenda items, especially during the REZONE scandal period. I won a few, I lost a few. That's how it works.
It's like a lot of things going on in many cities in many if not all states.It's worse than the swine flu...we're all infected/affected.
You got the "swine" part of the equation correct, Brian...