Posted on 12/24/2004 8:57:19 AM PST by NormsRevenge
California state and local budget crises aren't going to get fixed until state pension spiking is fixed - in every aspect. One previously unreported wrinkle was described in the Dec. 19 Sacramento Bee.
"California is the only state in the union that bases its pensions on an employee's highest single year of pay, rather than averaging three or more years," the paper reported. "The other 49 states use a three- to five-year average for rank-and-file workers, according to two recent surveys of state retirement systems."
The law allowing this was passed in 1990, with one dissenter in the Legislature. That was then- Assemblyman Tom McClintock, now a state senator from Simi Valley and for more than two decades the taxpayers' best friend in the Legislature.
The extra price tag to taxpayers is more than $100 million a year more than if retirement were based on an averaging system.
The Bee highlighted retired bureaucrat Sharon McGraw, who moved from her home in Roseville to an apartment in Oakland for the last 21 months of her state employment, where "her salary was approaching $8,000 a month. A portion of the raise was simply compensation for the Bay area's higher cost of living, she said."
The brief "sacrifice" spiked her pension another $18,000 a year. Then she moved back to Roseville.
(Excerpt) Read more at ocregister.com ...
The cost of California's retired public employee's will exceed the cost of welfare, law enforcement and education to the states taxpayers. CALPERS (CALifornia Public Employee's Retirement System) has replaced Rockefeller, Carnegie, Gould and Vanderbilt as this new Century's "Robber Barons".
I was playing golf in California in Oct. with a couple of guys from San Diego, they were grouseing that the police and firemen in San Diego get 90-95% of their salary as their pension. They were really Pi___ed about it.
Not surprising.
His vision and common sense thinking could only prompt such dissension.
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