The financial implosion at CalPERS, the giant California public pension fund, is now directly impacting municipalities. The city of Costa Mesa recently voted to send pink slips to 203 out of 472 of its full-time employees, warning them that they could lose their jobs within six months. The city plans to outsource the jobs to private companies in a desperate attempt to avoid making sharply increased payments to CalPERS.
One big problem is that CalPERS, if faced with a funding shortfall, can legally force the state and municipalities to pay more. Gov. Schwarzenegger complained about this, as the amount CalPERS and the other public pensions demanded last year from the state was over $3 billion. Costa Mesa wants to lay off as many employees as possible to avoid making much higher payments to CalPERS, something they see happening for at least five years into the future. They say they simply can’t afford it and thus will privatize as much as possible. The impact of this upon their city services is obvious. Morale among city employees is already at rock bottom.
Can privatized employees provide the same service that public employees do? Will they even be in Costa Mesa and not just at a call center somewhere? Will buildings continue to be inspected and the roads repaired? Who knows, but Costa Mesa is about to find out. Also, they are assuming that privatizing will cut costs but have made no actual contracts yet, so whether there will be genuine long-term savings is as yet unknown.
CalPERS and the rest of the public pensions are supposedly part of the free enterprise system. Yet they have no incentive to improve their performance, and the hand of the marketplace has no influence upon them. If they lose $500 million on a single real estate deal as they did with Stuyvesant Town, oh well, taxpayers will make up the difference. That this was a deeply risky investment to begin with and probably should have never been made in the first place, especially considering they are managing retirement money, seems to have not entered into their calculations.
If CalPERS was a private pension fund (or a hedge fund), given their lethargic performance, their top management would have been replaced long ago. Yet they seemingly exist on a planet of their own, free from any meaningful oversight and accountability. If they lose enormous sums, they simply force others to pay for their blunders. This is not fair to those whose money they manage nor is it fair to citizens of California who must pay up to fund pensions that are not theirs.
Costa Mesa clearly shares some of the blame. It has a deficit of $1.4 million this year, spends 80% of its budget to pay employees (the state average is 47%), and has $130 million in unfunded pension liabilities. That pension liability will be increasing sharply.
They are hardly alone. Many municipalities have been deferring responsibility for years, kicking pension funding down the road for someone else to worry about. The state has done the same. The predictable results from this are what we are seeing with Costa Mesa now.
Public employees are unfairly being made scapegoats for this crisis.
They {and their Pensions} are *not* the cause of the ongoing financial mess.
It was caused by Wall Street and the Mega Banks — combined with lax oversight by numerous Federal Regulatory agencies, which are supposedly protecting us from such wrongdoings. That’s where the moral outrage ought to be directed.
Where are all the Civil and Criminal trials of the countless CEOs and Directors were directly responsible for the collapse of the Financial markets?
How many of them have been sent to real Prisons? Only a handful of them have been fined a few thousand dollars and given 6 Month “sentences” in nice white-collar, resort-like detention facilities. Some are even allowed to be in their own Homes, as long as they wear a monitoring bracelet. They get this fancy treatment after a plea-bargain — without even admitting guilt.
There’s no sense in laying-off half of the city’s workforce. Privatizing won’t save the city any money; on the contrary — it will cost much, much more. Remember what happened with the privatization “experiment “with electric utilities. Lucky for Los Angeles, the LADWP did not go private, and did not get cheated as private out-of-State speculators “gamed” the trading of Electric Power “futures.”
Have *you* ever had to try to understand a guy in India who is trying to give you “Customer Support”? There’s Outsourcing for you!
Don’t forget, a non-city employee will likely *NOT* be working outside in the cold & rain; trying to restore your neighborhood’s electricity during a bad thunderstorm.
They won’t be working 24 hours in a row trying to stop the flooding of a whole city block, due to a broken 70 year-old water main.
These cities are lucky to have such faithful, reliable, knowledgeable and hard-working employees. Letting half of them GO is a very bad idea — think of all the many years of hard-earned experience that would be lost.
Oh yeah, Fannie-Mae, and Freddie-Mac were also a large part of the Financial Cri$i$ — with their bogus Mortgage-backed Securities ( bundling-up toxic Mortgage home loans.
Also, CalPERS is very likely to make back their investment losses (over a few years) and then everything will be OK again.
Dear C M, == {capricious webmaster}
Thanks for allowing my posting to be “published” on your web site.
Can you Please blank-out my left-over Email address on my first post
— it is NOT supposed to show.
If that is not possible, can you delete that reply?
Then I’ll be happy to submit the same comment again.
Thanx, Mark
Not sure which email address you mean. The email address you put in to post a comment never shows publicly
H20 dude — I don’t see your email address. If that helps.