SACRAMENTO — A year after his 2010 election, Gov. Jerry Brown confronted lawmakers about the steep cost of public employee pensions and urged them to pass his 12-point pension overhaul so public retirement costs would not overburden future generations.
“We don’t really have too much choice here,” Brown said, challenging fellow Democrats who control the Legislature to drink the political “castor oil” of pension reforms hotly opposed by politically powerful government employee unions.
Instead, legislators tinkered at the margins, passing some of Brown’s proposals but rejecting those with the biggest cost-savings potential. Although Brown touted it as the “biggest rollback to public pension benefits in the history of California,” it is now clear that the package of modest changes he signed into law in 2012 has done little to slow the growth of retirement costs. New projections show the state’s annual bill for retirement obligations is expected to reach $11 billion by the time Brown leaves office in January 2019 — nearly double what it was eight years earlier.
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