Posted on 07/04/2017 2:10:52 PM PDT by Rockitz
A new San Francisco civil grand jury report blames $5.8 billion in unfunded county public pension liabilities on voters not realizing that they were voting for two pension spikes.
Despite being Ground Zero for social justice warrior elites, San Franciscans always assumed they would never be ravaged by unions and crony liberal politicians spiking unfunded pensions, because the city’s century-old county charter required a public vote for any enhancement of a government benefit.
But when the Governmental Accounting Standards Board (GASB) issued Statements 67 and 68, which required greater public pension liability disclosures by mid-2015, auditors calculated that the national unfunded public sector pension liability for state and local governments had jumped by almost 50 percent to $1.378 trillion. In a surprise to ultra-liberal San Franciscans, their unfunded pension liability spiked to $5.8B.
According to a finding by the grand jury’s June 2017 report: “There are several causes for the underfunding of the Retirement System, but the main underlying cause is the retroactive retirement benefit increases implemented by voter-approved propositions between 1996 and 2008.”
The grand jury documented 12 separate initiatives that were put on the ballot by San Francisco’s County Supervisors and dutifully passed by the public between 1996 and 2012 that had some type of impact on retro-active retirement benefit increases.
The grand jury found that 10 ballot initiatives had a “Voter Information Pamphlet” that did not adequately inform voters of what they were voting on. Two of those voter-approved initiatives involved “significant” retroactive pension increases amounting to $3.5B.
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The grand jury referred to the spiking liability as a “Pension Tsunami.” It specifically found that between 1996 and 2008, “the Mayor, Board of Supervisors, Retirement Board, and Controller did not fulfill their responsibility to watch out for the interests of the City and its residents.”
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(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
-—Now here, when you build a single-family home, it has to have fire sprinklers-—
Wait’ are you serious ?
A new single family home is required to have a sprinkler system...?
That is absolutely insane...
“That is absolutely insane...”
NO, it’s just California today! And of course, the HO Insurance Companies are also behind it. We have so many smoke/CO detectors in our house, that if they all went off together ( and they are wired up to do just that ) we’d suffer hearing loss. The issue really is that the government, at all levels, acts like a preacher selling virtue. There is simply no expense to be spared in the name of safety, never mind that a lot of it really offers no improvement, but it does make someone wealthier and/or it adds more bureaucrats to “monitor” our lives.
This is why I always vote NO on such referenda, school bonds, libraries, public trusts, etc. I figure there are thousands of boobs who will vote for it because it sounds nice even though they’ve never read the proposition or the undisclosed details where they handed the government a carte blanche. My vote won’t offset theirs but I figure every little bit helps.
They got it easy. I have firefighter friends here in San Francisco, and they have to deal with highrises, as well as cliff and sea rescues along the waterfront. But I agree about the time spent at the firehouse. I've been to a couple and when not busy, they're cooking steaks, enjoying sports on big-screen TV and sometimes waxing their private cars nearby (shh, don't tell anyone). But they do have a dangerous job, and sometimes get hurt on the job - I've seen some with casts on broken limbs. Guys in the suburbs have it easier. But they're all paid very well and can retire at 50 with bigger pensions than other employees who retire at 65.
Its been over 30 years, but a Miami-Dade ballot was worded so that a tax decrease missed by a decimal point. A 10% decrease resulted, affecting all County expenditures. The error was eventually papered-over after voters passed the proposal.
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