Category Archives: Elsewhere in America

San Francisco public defender and pension reform advocate Jeff Adachi (see his speech on the subject here) is a progressive who favors pension reform. No surprise that his “efforts to force city workers into contributing more to their pension and health care benefits has made him persona non grata–especially among police and firefighters.” Firefighters asked Adachi to leave the Friday funeral of two firefighters killed in a recent house fire. Read the rest of the SF Chronicle story here.

“By taking advantage of a decades-old bidding war between Democrats and Republicans, all of whom want the union’s endorsement in order to appear tough on crime, the union has resisted any reform that would reduce costs in the state’s prison system.” Former Register editorial writer Steven Greenhut says the state’s powerful prison guards endeavor to jail as many Californians as possible–a kind of job insurance. Total cost to taxpayers: approximately $47,000 per prisoner per year, or about the cost of sending someone to the University of Southern California for one year. Read more of Greenhut’s City Journal article here.

While we’re all mesmerized by sexy, sunny Costa Mesa, Register columnist Frank Mickadeit was in Brea days ago watching the city council there drop pensions for new hires to  2 at 50–in layman’s terms, a pension formula that allows city employees to retire at 50 years of age with 2% of their most recent salary multiplied by the number of years served. A $100,000 city employee with 30 years of service would clock in at $60k per year, plus full health benies, until he goes into a fast-moving creek to retrieve his golf ball and ends up floating face down in the mighty Santa Ana River, still clutching his nine-iron and, it seems to go without saying, still sans the Titleist (which he insisted until his recent death on pronouncing “tit-lee-ist”).

“Councilman Marty Simonoff, a former cop, indicated he thinks the lower rate is fair, recalling that in 1973, ‘we were quite thrilled to get 2-at-50,’” Mickadeit reported.

In Costa Mesa, meanwhile, the same employee would pull down $90k until death. That’s a good reason to live.

Leaders of the union representing Costa Mesa city employees often assert that outsourcing city jobs is either unworkable or even “prohibited under California law.”

Costa Mesa ”hasn’t even looked at the consequences of outsourcing,” Orange County Employees Association spokesperson Jennifer Muir told the Daily Pilot in March. “If you have a leaky roof, you don’t demolish the house; you fix the roof. This is to advance a political agenda.”

Other cities have, in fact, looked at the consequences of outsourcing, and they’ve determined it’s precisely the way you repair metaphorically leaking roofs. *

The Bay Area city of Atherton “could outsource its public works and building departments as it looks to erase a nearly $1 million budget deficit,” the San Jose Mercury News reported. “Atherton is facing an estimated $900,000 budget deficit in the 2011-12 fiscal year, largely because of rising employee health and pension costs and declining property tax revenue. Its general fund reserves will be exhausted by 2015 if changes aren’t made, according to a five-year financial forecast.”

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* The March 17, 2011, Daily Pilot article cited here (“City’s layoff action ‘like a sinking boat’) is problematic in that it’s not the city’s plan to lay off employees in order to outsource their jobs that is anywhere compared to a foundering seagoing vessel, but the city itself, and then not merely by a city employee but the city councilman who ordered the pink-slipping. In any case, the article has to to have established some sort of record for Public Utterances of Analogies in  a Single Place. In addition to Muir (“leaky roof”), a city mechanic compared Costa Mesa with “a sinking boat,” a nautical image that seemed simultaneously to have captured things for Councilman Steve Mensinger, who said the outsourcing plan was one among many “plausible options to fiscally right our ship.” Mensinger then said the council has to act now because (shifting metaphors here), “We’ve come to the end of the road,” and because (shifting them again), “We can’t kick the can any longer”–though it’s arguable the “end of the road” cliche and the game of “kick the can” are etymologically related. Another city mechanic said the council majority’s willingness to issue pink slips before the outsourcing option had been thoroughly studied put ”the cart before the horse,” an observation that is true but required (the cart before horse, that is) by the union contract, an agreement that binds the employer (the city) to give its employee six months’ notice of its intention to lay off the employee. So, sure, the city did indeed place its conveyance oddly ahead of its equinic power source, but only because the union wished it so. In other parts of the world, especially at the management level where union protection is rare, a different policy prevails–the policy of being handed a lightweight cardboard box that might once have held HammerMill® Copy Plus Copy Paper and being told you have 15 minutes to clear out your office while an uncomfortably silent and awkward corporate security officer or HR director watches to make sure that you don’t use that moment to dash off a hasty, poorly conceived and angry email for general distribution or make off with the team playbook.

“SAN RAMON — City employees will have to take unpaid furlough days, pay more into their pensions and continue to work without raises — all cost-cutting measures San Ramon plans for the coming fiscal year. [...] Mayor Abram Wilson praised city staff for being understanding about the furloughs and for continuing to do more work with fewer people and no raises.” Read the rest of the San Jose Mercury News story here.