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Assembly Relents, Keeps Pension Bill
By John Hill and Jim Sanders
The Sacromento Bee, June 18, 2004
The action will allow debate before controversial benefits go into effect.
Assembly Democrats backed down Thursday from sending a controversial pension bill to the Senate, clearing the way for a debate about the bill before the pensions go into effect on July 1.
The two houses had locked horns over how to handle the bill, SB 9, which would reverse a law passed two years ago extending lucrative public-safety pensions to 3,200 state workers.
The 2002 law made an exception to public-safety retirement criteria to grant richer pensions to job titles ranging from state driving examiners to inspectors of milk, livestock and funeral homes.
The Assembly action Thursday refers the bill to an Assembly committee for a hearing next week.
"It's important that the schedule be such that the bill gets to the floor in time to take action before (June) 30th," said Assemblyman Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento.
Assemblyman Tony Strickland, R-Moorpark, said the impasse was broken in a discussion among party leaders.
"We said we're OK to have a hearing ... ," Strickland said. "I'm hopeful that the members actually get to debate the issue, and the members have to vote based on the merits of the bill."
Assembly Republican leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield said he also planned to bring up the issue in budget discussions between party leaders and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Canceling the pension increase would save the state about $11 million a year.
"When there's a common-sense solution, such as SB 9, we want to drive it," McCarthy said.
The bill is scheduled to be heard Wednesday by the Labor and Employment Committee. If it clears that committee, it would go the Public Employees, Retirement and Social Security Committee before returning to the full Assembly.
"I want to give it a hearing, so I'm not taking a position on it until it comes before the committee," said Assemblyman Paul Koretz, D-West Hollywood, chairman of the labor committee.
But Koretz said he had "concerns" about reversing a commitment to state workers because of a change in administration or difficult fiscal times.
"What's to stop us from throwing out every contract that we have with employees of the state?" he asked.
A two-part series published by The Sacramento Bee last month described three decades of growth in the number of state workers eligible for lucrative public-safety pensions.
First granted to California Highway Patrol officers in 1935, public-safety pensions covered just one in 20 state workers in the 1960s. Now, it's one in three.
The most recent major addition to the category occurred in 2002, when the California Union of Safety Employees persuaded then-Gov. Gray Davis and the Legislature to grant safety pensions to about 3,200 of its members.
For the workers, including Department of Motor Vehicles driving examiners and California Highway Patrol dispatchers, the change would mean getting 2.5 percent of their highest salary for each year of service, instead of the 2 percent most state workers get.
The 2002 bill - SB 183 by Senate President John Burton, D-San Francisco - skirted the procedure set up by the Legislature four years earlier for granting public-safety pensions.
Under that procedure, the department that deals with personnel matters was supposed to decide if workers met the criteria of coming into contact with prison inmates or state hospital patients or safeguarding the public.
In a memo to Davis, the California Public Employees' Retirement System said the bill would extend the special pensions to workers who "do not meet existing criteria." Under the logic of the bill, CalPERS said, just about any state worker could make an argument for getting the special pensions for playing some role in enforcing state laws.
The union contributed a total of more than $1 million to Davis and to lawmakers the year the bill was passed.
In response to The Bee's examination, state Sen. Tom McClintock, R-Simi Valley, this month amended a bill he wrote on a different subject, SB 9, to reverse the 2002 law before it went into effect in July.
The bill was in the Assembly because it had already passed, with its original subject matter, in the Senate.
The Assembly adopted McClintock's changes. But then, rather than acting on the bill, it tried to return it to the Senate. The Senate kicked it back, and took the extraordinary action of shutting the doors to its chambers to prevent the Assembly from trying again to return it.
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