No single act or piece of legislation by itself created the pension crisis that threatens to overwhelm the state and many local governments in California. The pension mess stems from a series of bad decisions, of fiscally reckless votes (many of them self-serving) in the Legislature, in city councils and county boards of supervisors. Still, in the state's downward spiral into a deep hole of pension debt, the passage of SB 2465 more than a decade ago stands out. On the last night of the 1990 legislative session, the innocuous contents of SB 2465 were gutted on the Assembly floor...
