I couldn't have done it without a real dedicated Board of Supervisors...
We found out today that Wayne Quint, the head boss of the Deputy Sheriff’s union is quitting – supposedly to take a job at the State. Well the State is so effed-up it’s hard to imagine anybody making it any worse, even somebody with no identifiable job skills.
Or judgment. Consider Quint’s ill-conceived plan to spent hundreds of thousands of bucks to support the carpetbagging assclown, Harry Sidhu. Apparently Quint was so scared of Shawn Nelson that he was willing to squander a fortune of his member’s dues on the boob Sidhu.
Supervisor material? Wayne Quint thought so.
Come to think of it, maybe his members will be glad to see him go, too.
Political talk radio hosts John and Ken announced that they will be coming to Fullerton on Thursday to counter the demonstration for higher taxes put on by the Fullerton teachers’ unions.
Apparently they were egged on by the receipt of a flyer listing five hundred and eighty five Fullerton teachers and administrators who make a lot of money.
Here’s a fun match up between pension watchdog Steven Greenhut and the head of the OCEA public employees’ union, Nick Berardino. The subject of yesterday’s debate was “Can pensions be reformed co-operatively?”
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?
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.
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.
Here’s a bit of exciting news coming out of the County Health Care Agency that is the local entity that oversees Emergency Medical Service provision. A new trend may be emerging.
It’s about the idea contracting with private service providers for paramedic services. The model is pretty simple: the paramedic goes with the ambulance, not with one of a city’s fire engine companies, who necessarily escorts their paramedic to an accident scene then has to toodle on over to the hospital to pick up their boy who has meanwhile accompanied the private ambulance to the ER.
And never a fire in sight; a fire crew mostly just driving around in their big shiny engine, sight-seeing.
Don't you watch the news?
The present scenario is so dysfunctional it’s amazing that it has lasted as long as it has. And that’s a backwards tribute to the “firefighter” lobby who knew fires were decreasing a long time ago and got their foot in the paramedic door; and to the supine politicians who let them do it.
But, as they say, that was then. And this is now. Municipalities are being crushed under the burden of “public safety” salaries and pensions and the current way of doing things is apparently no longer deemed to be carved in stone.
Tonight’s Martha Montelongo radio show will feature author and editorialist Steven Greenhut, who was attacked this week by the International Association of Firefighters and painted as an evil front man in the battle to rein in ridiculous public employee pensions.
Here is the new IAFF commercial, which was also featured on a segment of some left wing thing called “The ED Show.” The ad replays truthful statements of Steven Greenhut along withJohn Stossel and Glen Beck interlaced with video of fire heroes falling down and putting people on stretchers.
The underlying theme of conflict between logic and emotion is believed to be intentional.
Tune in to KRLA AM 870 or KRLA870.com tonight at 11 pm to catch Greenhut and a few others on the Martha Montelongo Show.
Here’s a new message from Harold A. Schaitberger (yes that’s the head of the International Firefighter’s union’s real name) where he warns firefighters that “attacks on your pension plans are like a tsunami rolling across the country.”
A pension tsunami? Chief, I think you’re a little mixed up. Pension Tsunami is a famous little website that was cooked up right here in Fullerton, CA, and you probably don’t want to be spreading THAT message any further. Oh well, too late.
