IN CASE YOU’VE FORGOTTEN, FOSTER & COUNCIL APPROVED EMPLOYEE PENSIONS
By Bill Pearl
It was early July 2006 when outgoing Mayor Beverly O’Neill, Councilwoman Laura Richardson—chair of the Budget Oversight Committee and a candidate for state assembly—and City Manager Jerry Miller publicly announced that a three-year plan that became a four-year plan had eliminated Long Beach government’s budget deficit. LBReport.com was at City Hall to capture the moment, which the three officials dramatized with a photo-op: the shredding of Long Beach’s deficit-plagued 2003 budget.
But almost exactly four years earlier, in 2002, Mayor O’Neill had presided over two City Council votes that approved boosts in pension payouts to non-public-safety city employees represented by the International Association of Machinists (IAM) union. City Hall distracted public attention from the council action by scheduling the pension-increase votes on the last day of an outgoing Council and the first day of an incoming one. (It worked, to an extent: other Long Beach-area media outlets focused on the ceremonies, although LBReport.com covered the two pension votes.)
The 2002 pension-increase votes also were scheduled just weeks after O’Neill was safely reelected to a third term amid claims by her supporters that she had City Hall “on the right track.”
But a few weeks after those pension-increase votes—when the 2003 budget was unveiled—it turned out that Long Beach was running off the tracks, and O’Neill was announcing that City Hall faced a major fiscal crisis, a serious looming deficit. How did things turn so sour so suddenly? They didn’t. Months before, City Manager Henry Taboada had informed the Mayor and Council about the deficit—in writing—although his memos received relatively little attention as O’Neill sought her third term.
In 2006, with the O’Neill-Richardson-Miller budget-shredding ceremony still fresh in everyone’s minds, Bob Foster successfully ran for mayor with the backing of Long Beach’s police and firefighter unions.
In 2007, Foster supported—and the Council unanimously approved—voluntarily reopening City Hall’s contract with the police union to increase its members’ pay, which of course had the effect of increasing future pension payouts. City officials said the raises and eventual pension increases were needed to prevent Long Beach officers from join other police departments.
In early 2008, Foster supported five-year contracts—two more than the usual three-year contracts—with City Hall’s two other major employee groups: the firefighters and the IAM. During the City Council’s discussion of the issue, Council member Rae Gabelich asked City Manager Pat West a straightforward question: “How are we going to pay for this?” When she didn’t receive an equally straightforward answer, Gabelich voted “no” on both contracts. Council member Gary DeLong joined her in voting “no” on the IAM contract.
Had those two contracts been typical three-year agreements—instead of the five-year agreements supported by Foster—they would be expiring now. That would have allowed City Hall to declare an impasse in negotiations with the police and firefighters unions and impose changes in those pension plans that would save taxpayers money—which is what as City Hall recently did with a smaller city engineers union.
Instead, taxpayers can now expect to pay the pensions approved by the mayor and council majorities through 2012, 2013 and into 2014—and they are not happy about it.
Suddenly, Foster isn’t happy with that prospect, either. In his State of the City address last month, he threatened Long Beach’s three major employees unions with an ultimatum: if they don’t agree to pension changes (voluntarily now or negotiated when their contracts expire in 2014), Foster said he will advance a ballot measure to prevent future city councils from agreeing to pension benefits on unsustainable terms—like the ones Foster and the city council approved in 2008.
8 Comments
Thanks for the clear and concise summation, Mr. Pearl. Do you see no cause for optimism in pension-related language in the current POA contract? Specifically:
Section 1(C): “If any three (3) of the following agencies: Anaheim, Glendale, Huntington Beach, Santa Ana, Santa Monica, Torrance, Irvine, Redondo Beach, and Newport Beach, convert to a 3% @ 55 CalPERS formula, the LBPOA agrees to automatically convert to a 3% @ 55 CalPERS formula for new bargaining unit members.”
and
Section 1(E): “The parties agree to re-open the agreement on March 1, 2011 and at any time during the term of this agreement with thirty (30) days notice by either party solely for the purposes of discussing changes to the pension plan for bargaining unit members. Changes will only be made by mutual agreement of both parties.
Mr. Pearl should teach journalism to the many paper-hanging plebes at the Press Telegram. It might re-energize their sense of shame.
I’ve never seen a need for unions, such as they are, related to government agencies. Pitting a small indispensable group against taxpayers seems bizarre. Unions were originally intended as an answer to sociopathic robber barons, shysters, and those who would game the system to establish indentured servitude, not as a tool to squeeze every last penny from public coffers via the intimidation of amoral city council miscreants.
How can you not have corrupt government with a perpetual union gang pointing a virtual gun at every elected officials head at every election? Of course Foster comes off as a flustered nincompoop. It’s the only way to be politically successful around here.
Very good comments by Mr. Greet.
@Jason: I would say that since all public or private employees should enjoy the right to voluntarily and collectively bargain for the best wages and working conditions they can receive from their employer, public employee labor unions still serve a very necessary function.
Another important function public employee labor organizations can serve is to pool financial resources to keep a couple of good labor-relations attorneys on retainer. I know this may shock you but some public employees are actually sometimes unreasonably disciplined and/or wrongfully suspended or terminated. In such cases these employees deserve competent legal council to help them defend themselves and a labor union can help to provide that service where the individual employee may not always be able to afford the considerable costs involved.
Where I often part ways with many of my former public employee union colleagues is in the area of political action. In my view, most political action conducted by public employee unions represents a considerable conflict of interest. I think it is patently inappropriate for a public employee union to attempt to influence the elections of public officials who may later be making decisions about the pay and benefits of those same public employees.
The exception to this is the sort of political lobbying that public safety employee unions often engage in to help certain legislation pass. For instance, lobbying to have legislation enacted that increases the civil and criminal penalties for those who assault or murder police officers is, in my view, an appropriate political activity for public safety employee unions to engage in.
But where political candidates who can influence decisions about pay, benefits and working conditions are concerned, I think public employee unions should be restricted. Public employees do (and should) retain the right to be as politically active as they like, as *individuals*. But their unions should not be able to bring collective influence to bear upon the election of candidates who can later vote to increase pay and benefits when such a vote may well prove counter to the will of a true majority of the electorate which those in office have sworn oaths to represent.
“How can you not have corrupt government with a perpetual union gang pointing a virtual gun at every elected officials head at every election?”
like the lbpoa does in every election, the lbpoa of which you are a member. just a reminder greet, youre living off the fruits of your unions “political action”. why is it that republicans are ALWAYS “i got mine fuck the rest of you”. ive long suspected a link between conservative political philosophy and a profound lack of empathy for ones fellow humans and greet does nothing to dispel that notion with his ill informed blather.
howardx: You could not be more wrong in my case. From the moment I learned that I could legally separate and discontinue my participation in the political activities of my former union from all of its other activities (e.g. collective bargaining, legal representation, etc), I did so. From that moment forward I did not contribute a dime to the unions PAC fund, did not walk a single political precinct and did not answer a single call on a phone bank.
While some of their political activities were important and, I thought, necessary (such as supporting legislation to increase civil and criminal penalties for those who assualt or murder police officers), we routinely parted ways in the political candidates they chose to support and endorse.
But let’s be clear, the POA and any other public employee union only has the influence over our elected officials that we, the voters, allow them to have. The POA could spend a billion dollars to get someone elected and have that person in their pocket forever afterward, but it is the voters who always have the *final* say about who is elected to public office and who is allowed to *remain* in that office once they are elected.
All we voters have to do is better remember that we have that authority and that responsibility and then start behaving accordingly.
why is it that republicans are ALWAYS “i got mine fuck the rest of you”. ive long suspected a link between conservative political philosophy and a profound lack of empathy for ones fellow humans and greet does nothing to dispel that notion with his ill informed blather.
Correction: republicans can tend to embrace the philosophy of “I got mine, fuck the rest of you,” however, democrats tend to embrace the philosophy, “I got yours, and it’s not enough.”
Just keepin’ it real.
Jason: My empathy toward my fellow humans takes many forms that you will never know or fully appreciate. Nor need you.
My empathy toward my fellow humans in Long Beach on this particular issue is primarily demonstrated through my constant encouragement that more of them take a greater, more active and more intelligent role in participating in their city government. This is often characterized by others as “bloviating” or “indulging in tired civics lessons” but it really is neither.
Any and every ill that my fellow humans in Long Beach may choose to identify in our city government can be ultimately traced back to one goup of people here and one group alone…the electors…the voters.
The voters have the authority, the power and the *responsibility* to create the government in Long Beach that they most desire to serve them and as rightly constrained by the rule of law. Thus to whatever degree that government does not reflect the desires of the majority of the voters, the voters ultimately have no one to blame but themselves.
This is true of all governmental functions, from City Hall to the School Board.
Michael Shane Ellis made an abject laughing stock of our local school board for many years and he was only able to do so because the voters elected him to replace Dr. Lowenthal in the first place and then failed to recall him later, despite his multiple arrests for multiple public offenses and being on active criminal probation while *still serving* on the Board. Ellis had no business serving on our School Board but it was a majority of the voters who put him there and it was the majority of voters who allowed him to remain there until he finally resigned on his own, in the middle of the night, in a most cowardly and unprofessional fashion. To this day his name can still be seen on the sign advertising a future school planned near Redondo and Hill. What an utter disgrace!
Where City Hall is concerned, it is, once again, the voters who are ultimately in charge, little though they behave as if they are. On the City of Long Beach Organization Chart you will see that above all of the other “sticks and boxes” there exists one box that contains one term: “Electorate.” The voters…ranked above the Mayor…above the Council or any other elected official…above the City Manager or any other appointed official, the electorate, the voters, have more authority, more power and more *responsibility* than all of the others.
All we do in electing and appointing others to serve us in government is to delegate some of our *authority* to them so that they may complete certain tasks so that we do not have to do them ourselves. We can delegate *authority* but we can never delegate (or avoid) our *responsibility.*
Whatever messes may exist in our city government may have initially been made by others but we, the voters, and no one else, have the *responsibility* to clean them up. When we do not…when we allow those messes to persist or to get worse…we can ultimately only blame ourselves.
Now, Jason, we can all sit around here and on other public websites and whine and moan about how bad things are or we can step up and encourage our fellow voters to start to do something constructive to make it better.
Over the past few years in particular, several good people around town have been attempting the latter approach. But more of us…many more…are required if we are ever going to change things in a substantive way.