Recent labor agreements, costly court settlements and funding for combating homelessness are driving up expenses and could hamper plans to expand city services in the coming years, a new City Administrative Office report suggests. Despite an improving economy in Los Angeles, the report warns of “renewed fiscal challenges” for the city.
Thirty cities including New York and Chicago jointly asked automakers for the cost and feasibility of providing 114,000 electric vehicles, including police cruisers, street sweepers and trash haulers, said Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who is coordinating the effort. That would be comparable to about 72 percent of total U.S. plug-in sales last year.
The average full career (30 years work) pension for a retired public employee in California was $68,673 in 2015, not including benefits. This is in comparison to the average pay (not including benefits) for an active full-time worker in the private sector in California, which in 2015 was $54,326, and to the maximum Social Security Benefit for a high wage earner retiring at age 66, which in 2015 was $32,244. Put another way, the average public employee retiree with 30 years of service collects a pension (not including benefits) that is 26% greater than the average pay for a non-retired full time private sector worker, and more than twice the maximum Social Security benefit.
The East Contra Costa Fire District (ECCFD) has financial problems because it pays more for retirement benefits than it does in salaries to current employees. With most of its staff eligible to retire on the 3% at 50 formula and at least two current retirees receiving more than $100,000 annually, the district is functioning as more of a retirement plan than as a firefighting unit. Rather than economize on its pension benefits, district leadership has closed fire stations and made repeated attempts to extract more taxpayer funds.
Facing insolvency, Santa Barbara’s Hope Elementary School district governing board laid off six full-time and three part time teachers, effective next academic year. . . During the 2016 school year, general fund expenditures exceeded revenues by $132,000. Among the district’s expenditures were a $146,000 contribution to CalPERS and a $458,000 contribution to CalSTRS.
The California Supreme Court says the public has the right to access emails and text messages about government business sent on California officials’ private accounts. . . The use of private email accounts by public officials has faced scrutiny in recent years, with some using it as a way to avoid disclosure. Many states treat those emails as public records.
Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed state budget may have mistakenly excluded some $22 billion from a formula to limit spending that was first imposed by voters in 1979, according to a new study by the Legislature’s independent analysts.
A new teacher’s pension is supposed to be a perk. The truth is that for the majority of the nation’s new teachers, what they can anticipate in retirement benefits will be worth less than what they contributed to the system while they were in the classroom, even if they stay for decades. . . It’s not unfair to say that these systems now treat new teachers as sources of revenue for other people’s pensions rather than valued employees in their own right. For a nation that places great emphasis on equity, it is astonishing that so many states now tacitly endorse retirement systems that are inequitable to current and future generations of new teachers.
The reduced expectation, disclosed late Monday in documents from the largest U.S. public pension fund, is based on a lower-risk, lower-return asset allocation adopted by CalPERS in September and announced in December. . . Pension analysts are skeptical that funds can keep generating higher returns in the long run. Most funds are cash negative, meaning they are now paying out more money to retirees than they collect from current workers and employers.
“Actuaries are recommending that one of the state’s oldest public pension systems, the California State Teachers Retirement System formed in 1913, lower its investment earnings forecast from 7.5 percent to 7.25 percent. If the newly empowered CalSTRS board adopts the lower forecast next week, state rates paid to the pension fund would increase by 0.5 percent of pay, an additional $153 million bringing the total state payment next fiscal year to $2.8 billion.”
Public schools around California are bracing for a crisis driven by skyrocketing worker pension costs that are expected to force districts to divert billions of dollars from classrooms into retirement accounts, education officials said. The depth of the funding gap became clear to district leaders when they returned from the holiday break: What they contribute to the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, known as CalPERS, will likely double within six years, according to state estimates.
But Brown’s fiscal restraint posturing is more talk than action. His first enacted budget since re-election in 2010 totaled $128.3 billion (June 2016 dollars) in General and Special Fund expenditures. By 2016-2017, the budget had ballooned 30 percent to $167.1 billion. Overall, Brown has increased real General and Special Fund spending by an average of 5 percent per year.
State payments to CalPERS next fiscal year are expected to total $6 billion, nearly double the $3.2 billion paid six years ago before a wave of employer rate increases. . . Meanwhile, what had been the fastest-growing annual retirement cost in the budget, retiree health care for state workers, only increased by about half during the last six years, going from $1.5 billion in fiscal 2011 to $2.2 billion next year.
How expensive are the 13 state labor contracts that are going to ratification votes this month? . . . The new analysis suggests the total cost may be closer to $2.1 billion that year, mostly because of increased overtime.
The Brown administration is ending a program that coordinated care for seniors and low-income families because it was no longer cost effective. . . Federal regulations requiring in-home caregivers to receive overtime after 40 hours per week drove the cost of the program up with the minimum wage hike. . . Cutting the program will shift the labor costs onto the counties, which is estimated to cost more than $4.4 billion over the next six years . . . “This would be devastating to counties all over the state,” CSAC President and Alameda County Supervisor Keith Carson said in a statement. “We undoubtedly would have to make cuts in other vital social services to cover these costs.”