Here’s something unexpected: the progressive collective of California voters appears to be sick and tired of supporting the exorbitant retirement schemes of our public servants.
A new poll by the Los Angeles Times and the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences found that pension reform is supported in this state by a wide margin. Specifically…
70% want to cap pensions for current and future public employees;
68% say public workers must contribute more to their own retirement funds;
52% support hiking the retirement age of government workers.
I wonder how that poll would go over in Fullerton?
Project Islamic H.O.P.E and the NAACP paid a visit to Fullerton today to protest at the home of Marilyn Davenport, the OC GOP Central Committee member who has drawn fire from just about everyone everywhere for sending out an email depicting Barack Obama as a chimpanzee.
An outcry against racism? Sure. Calls for Davenport’s resignation? OK. But these protesters seem to have something else in mind:
Does the office of the presidency demand unconditional love and respect? Should Americans not be “allowed” to insult the President?
Today the Register is reporting that Union officials for the Fullerton-based Teamsters Local 747 are taking heat for wasting hundreds of thousands of dollars of union money on luxurious junkets and personal expenses. Even International Teamsters leader James P. Hoffa called the expenses “excessive.”
Amongst other abuses, union officials and employees were exposed for blowing $102,399 at Spadra, an Italian restaurant on Commonwealth in Fullerton (formerly Il Ghiotto, now closed).
Wow, a hundred grand sure will get ya a big pile of spaghetti. I’ll bet there was a little booze involved, too.
Your diet coke will be out in a moment.
Alright, so this fiasco doesn’t involve any public employee unions. But fraud, abuse and excess has plagued the leadership of public and private collective bargaining organizations since the glory days of union thuggery. Maybe this is just just a good reminder to union members: you ought to be checking up to make sure that your glorious leaders aren’t living high on the collective supply.
Last week we looked at the number of FSD employees who make over $90k. Now let’s see the salaries of Fullerton Joint Union High School District teachers and administrators for the 2009-10 school year.
Wow. Four hundred and thirty-two of them earn over $90,000 per year. Some of them teach a little extra summer school while others get stipends for CERT training, coaching badminton or being a leader. There’s also a secretary and a couple of custodian supervisors who earned over $60k in overtime alone.
You can look at this data any way you want, but it’s hard to deny that Fullerton’s educators are very well compensated. The myth of the “poor, underpaid teacher” is crushed.
Bonus Trivia
Which FFFF blogger spent several years molding the young minds of Fullerton’s high schoolers back in the 1980’s?
In the article, Thompson (the top overall Fullerton vote-getter in 2010) outlines his battle to improve the value and quality of public education by making a portion of teacher compensation based on performance, rather than just seniority and certificates.
Thompson is an avowed conservative in a conservative town, but he frequently finds himself voting against the other school board members on financial issues. He blames the power of the public employee unions for much of the financial challenges that our school districts face today.
So what about that “challenging the status quo” label? Chris doesn’t seem to accept furlough days and class size increases as a good deal for kids OR taxpayers. If that makes him an anomaly on the school board, then our kids really are getting swindled.
The other day someone remarked that Don Bankhead has never accepted the blame for any of the bad votes he’s made since the beginning of his 23 year reign on the city council.
Twenty-three years at the helm…surely there must be at least one single thing that even the most narcissistic of government officials would accept partial blame for, right? Well, how about Fullerton’s pension crisis? Don Bankhead voted for every single pension and salary spike put in front of him over the last 23 years, and has done absolutely nothing to curb the excesses that have brought hundreds of millions in debt upon the shoulders of Fullerton Taxpayers.
Let’s see what he has to say for himself:
Who’s fault is it? Oh, it’s the stock market’s fault!
Nobody could have possibly predicted that stock investments carry an inherent risk, and that their value may not increase forever, and that by boosting these pension commitments, Bankhead was dumping ever-increasing chunks of risk onto future generations of Fullerton taxpayers. And of course the unions would never try to talk an unsuspecting buffoon into boosting their benefits at the very peak of a cycle, where smooth sailing into a rich eternity seems practically guaranteed.
Up and down? That theory is old fashioned.
Nope, none of this is evident to the dim bulb who went along with the biggest series of heists in Fullerton history. It’s all somebody else’s fault, and there’s nothing that he can do about it now.
Sadly, nobody has had the heart to tell Don Bankhead that the pain of nearly two hundred million dollars in pension debt will be shared by his very own children and grandchildren.
It’s almost April. Our wise and courageous city council is already wading through wage negotiations with the city employee unions for the upcoming budget year. How did we get this far without adding up Fullerton’s total unfunded pension obligation? Oh well, here it goes…
Pension Plan
Total Liability
Market Value of Assets
Unfunded Liability
Fullerton Public Safety
$324,288,070
$197,444,920
$126,843,150
Fullerton Miscellaneous
$202,257,209
$136,167,010
$66,090,199
That’s a grand total of $192 million in what is essentially “pension debt” for which we have no foreseeable plan to pay, even when we include all of our future contributions and expected market gains.
The pension plans are already paying out $9 million more per year to retirees than they are taking in via contributions, so there’s no help there. But our required contributions are increasing significantly, starting this year.
With no perceivable way out of this hole, maybe it’s time to hit the road and put it all on black.
I think I'm getting the fear.
All of these numbers came from the 2010 CalPERS reports for Fullerton’s Public Safety and Miscellaneous pension plans.
FFFF has been trying to obtain the police report filed after several Fullerton police officers conducted a narcotics raid on the wrong house and held an innocent pastor and his family at gunpoint last year (read the story here).
Since the family presented a copy of the police report to the council at a public meeting, that document is now undeniably a public record. But the cops and the city administrators love to keep secrets when they blow it, and thus have deployed one ornery city attorney to block out any sunshine on this case. God forbid the public learns about the mistakes it’s own cops are making.
We have the right to remain silent
But here’s where it gets weird. In this email below, the city attorney justifies keeping the report secret by admitting that crimes were committed when the cops entered the wrong house with guns drawn!
Travis,
After reviewing the police records in a light most favorable to the Nordells if the entry made by the officers were unlawful they may have been victims of several crimes, namely assault, trespass and a civil rights violation. If the officers did enter with guns drawn, they more than likely experienced the fear that goes accompanied with such entry. While, we are not acknowledging any of those unlawful acts occurred it does establish that they are victims of a crime. As victims of a crime they were the only party entitled to obtain the police report under Gov Code 6254 (f).
Kathya M. Oliva
Jones & Mayer
Let’s go over that again. Did our city just deny a public records request by confirming that its officers committed assault, trespass and civil rights violations? Pretty much. Admitting guilt to cover your tracks is a novel approach to criminal defense.
FFFF’s response? If there was a crime committed against the family, the incident should have been referred to the DA for prosecution. Was it? If not, covering up the report because there “may have” been a crime doesn’t hold legal water.
Our question was met with a friendly invitation to sue the city in Superior Court…which is actually a great idea. I can’t think of a better way to bring more attention to this issue.
