American Workers Subsidizing Unions With Tax Dollars

July 1, 2015 By Larry Sand 1 Comment

In St. Charles, IL, a teacher is paid $141,105 not to teach. In Philadelphia, “ghost employees” who don’t do work for the state collect benefits from the state. In Kalamazoo, MI a former teacher is collecting a government pension of $85,903 a year even though he didn’t teach his last 14 years, but instead worked as a union employee.

Called “release time,” or “official time” at the federal level, it’s a practice that allows public employees to conduct union business during working hours without loss of pay. These activities include negotiating contracts, lobbying, processing grievances, and attending union meetings and conferences.

According to Trey Kovacs, a policy analyst at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, this racket has cost the federal government about $1 billion since 1998. Between 2008 and 2011, the fraud has increased from 2.9 million hours at a cost of $121 million to 3.4 million hours at a cost of $155 million.

School boards, which frequently consist of members bought and paid for by the teachers unions, are particularly guilty of this crime against the taxpayer. In CA, where the California Teachers Association wields great power, the situation is particularly egregious. Typically this scam is written into collective bargaining contracts and comes in different flavors. Sometimes the school district will pay for the cost of a sub if the teacher/union employee needs to do work for the union. In Los Angeles, page 6 of the teacher contract states that the United Teachers of Los Angeles “may request the release of designated employees from their regular duties with no loss of pay for the purpose of attending to UTLA matters, with the expense of the substitute or replacement to be borne by UTLA.”

Sounds fair, right? But it’s not.

The substitute invariably makes a lot less than the teacher/union employee and the taxpayer is sucking up the difference in pay. The teacher is also racking up pension time, (which is taxpayer-subsidized), while doing union work. And of course the students lose out by having frequent subs, who often are nothing more than placeholders.

In other districts, the union gets a completely free pass. Page 15 of Orange County’s Fountain Valley School District contract reads, “The Association (union) President or designee may utilize one (1) day per week for Association business. The District shall bear the cost of the substitutes.” So a classroom teacher of 15 years, who doubles as union president, makes an$89,731 yearly salary, or $485 a day. The taxpayer is also paying $100 a day for a sub which brings the total to $585 for one day of union business per week. Repeated over the 38 week teaching year, the taxpayer is on the hook for $22,230. And that amount does not include the thousands of dollars the employer (ultimately the taxpayer) has to pay for contributions to the teacher/union leader’s retirement fund, health benefits, unemployment insurance and workers compensation.

With over a thousand school districts in the state doing business like Los Angeles and Fountain Valley, we are talking about serious larceny.

Not everyone has rolled over and accepted this criminal arrangement. Jim Gibson, a former Marine Corps Captain who had sat on the Vista Unified School District board for 13 years, was outraged at the fraudulent set-up and decided to act. He initiated a lawsuit against the Vista Teachers Association in 2011, using a section of the California education code to make his case:

The governing board of a school district shall grant to any employee, upon request, a leave of absence without loss of compensation for the purpose of enabling the employee to serve as an elected officer of any local school district public employee organization, or any statewide or national public employee organization with which the local organization is affiliated.

… Following the school district’s payment of the employee for the leave of absence, the school district shall be reimbursed by the employee organization of which the employee is an elected officer for all compensation paid the employee on account of the leave.Reimbursement by the employee organization shall be made within 10 days after its receipt of the school district’s certification of payment of compensation to the employee. (Emphasis added.)

Gibson and the school district won the case.  All monies paid to do union business were ordered to be repaid by the union to the district. This ruling should have had ramifications statewide, but clearly it hasn’t. And things won’t change until enough citizens rise up and put an end to it.

What can be done?

One way to stop the criminal practice of taxpayer-supported “release time” would be to open collective bargaining negotiations to the public. That kind of sunlight would go a long way toward disinfecting wounds inflicted by unions and compliant school board members.

More than anything, citizens need to get involved. Examine the part of your local teacher union contract that is headed Organizational Security, Association Rights or (Name of local union) Rights. Ask your local school board president how the district deals with this policy. Go to school board meetings and ask questions about the contract wording and ask for verification that that district actually lives up to the contract. Talk to your friends, family, neighbors and your kid’s teacher. Talk to the media if necessary.

If we the people don’t care enough to stop it, union orchestrated taxpayer theft will go on unabated.

Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.

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SoCal’s Housing Crisis: Middle Class, Minorities May Not Survive

April 24, 2015 By Joel Kotkin 3 Comments

urban-housing-sprawl-366c0What kind of urban future is in the offing for Southern California? Well, if you look at both what planners want and current market trends, here’s the best forecast: congested, with higher prices and an ever more degraded quality of life. As the acerbic author of the “Dr. Housing Bubble” blog puts it, we are looking at becoming “los sardines” with a future marked by both relentless cramming and out-of-sight prices.

This can be seen in the recent surge of housing prices, particularly in the areas of the region dominated by single-family homes. You can get a house in San Francisco – a shack, really – for what it costs to buy a mansion outside Houston, or even a nice home in Irvine or Villa Park. Choice single-family locations like Irvine, Manhattan Beach and Santa Monica have also experienced soaring prices.

Market forces – overseas investment, a strong buyer preference for single-family homes and a limited number of well-performing school districts – are part of, but hardly all, the story. More important may be the increasingly heavy hand of California’s planning regime, which favors ever-denser development at the expense of single-family housing in the state’s interior.

In both the Bay Area and Southern California, plans are now being set to force the building of massive new towers in a few selected “transit-oriented” zones. In a bow to political realities, the planners say they won’t bring superdensity to the single-family neighborhoods beloved by Californians; the wealthy – including those who bought early and those with access to inherited money – will still be able to enjoy backyard play sets, barbecues and swimming pools. 

Home prices skyrocket

The rest of you had better get used to cramming. House prices over the past two years in Orange and Los Angeles counties have risen at a rate more than 10 times the relatively paltry increases in weekly paychecks, among the nation’s worst ratios of home prices to income. Now, you can’t buy a house in much of Orange County or West L.A. without a triple-digit income; in Manhattan Beach, buying a median-price house requires an income of more than $300,000 a year.

With development on the periphery basically shut down for lack of sufficient transit usage, the bright folks at SCAG, MTC, ABAG, SANDAG (the regional planning agencies in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area and San Diego, respectively) foresee a future of ever-increasing density, with apartment towers interspersed throughout the cities.

To be sure, city life and density might seem great, and could even work to some extent in smaller, scenic areas like Laguna Beach or Santa Monica, with their accessible walking districts. But such locales are only a small part of Southern California.

To live in a high-rise in Ontario or Garden Grove might please planners, but density without much amenity – and nothing that will ever be close to a New York-style transit system or even a system as good as that serving downtown Los Angeles – seems more a ticket to a neo-tenement purgatory than paradise.

For areas that lack ocean breezes or scenic views, we are looking at something more like the congested chaos of Mexico City or Tehran than the tourist’s Paris on the Pacific (more than 80 percent of Paris, France, is outside the compact core).

The biggest losers, as usual, will be those people – working and middle-class families as well as minorities – who have looked to the periphery for housing opportunities and a chance for a better life. Los Angeles County is already a majority-renting community, and attempts to force densification in other counties could bring this reality to Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and Ventura counties as well. 

Where minorities can thrive

Until recently, the periphery has offered housing salvation for younger middle-income homeowners, particularly families. Homeownership rates are more than 25 percent higher in the Riverside-San Bernardino area than in the Los Angeles-Orange County area. Minorities also do much better. The homeownership rate inland is a quarter higher among African American and Asian households. The rate for Hispanics is nealy half again higher than in Los Angeles-Orange.

But as housing prices have soared, and opportunities to move outward have shrunk, Southern California has developed some of the worst crowding in the nation. Three of the most crowded areas – based on people per room – are in Los Angeles County: South Los Angeles, the Pico Union area near downtown LA and Huntington Park. Southern California trails only Miami, Fla., for the highest percentage of residents who spend 40 percent or more of their incomes on rent or a mortgage.

The impact of high prices extends well beyond the poor and minorities. As a recent report from the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office suggests, the lack of affordable housing is one reason why California companies have trouble attracting employees, particularly those with families. To keep the digital hearths going in places like Silicon Valley, companies rely on either young people (often with family money) or, increasingly, low-wage workers, called “technocoolies” by some, imported from Asia.

The LAO is spot on about the disadvantages of California housing, which now costs two and half times the national average, and rents that are 50 percent higher than in the country as a whole. Homeownership rates now stand at 48th among the states. Unfortunately, the proposed solutions follow the same script adopted by our planning elites that seeks to further densify large swaths of central Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area, which, since 2000, have accounted for roughly 10 percent of all growth in the state. 

Affluent exempt

This planning fiat is sure to spark fierce resistance. Don’t expect to see high-rises sprout amid the expanses of single-family housing in Malibu or Beverly Hills, due to the organized power of their overwhelmingly “progressive” residents. Higher-density development likely will be jammed, instead, into already denser, less-affluent and less politically powerful areas, such as the east San Fernando Valley, North Orange County and some inland communities.

There’s nothing wrong with appealing to a market for apartments, but limiting the expansion of single-family construction will only exacerbate our looming demographic dilemmas. Southern California’s family population is decreasing more than any of the nation’s other large metro areas. Homes are increasingly owned by an aging population lucky enough to have bought before the new planning regime helped drive prices into the stratosphere. Young workers may be amused by dense, high-cost rental space, at least until they desire to start families and own homes. But the crucial middle-class households headed by thirty- and fortysomethings may find themselves forced out of the region if they are unwilling to accept a lower quality of life.

Some of the logic behind densification was based on the perception that the suburban dream is dead. Yet, despite persistent claims by planners and pundits, this turned out to be less a matter of altered market preferences than of temporary effects of the Great Recession. Roughly 80 percent of Americans still prefer single-family homes. So do Californians: In the past decade, single-family units represented the vast majority of all new homes built in the state.

Now that the economy is coming back to life, suburban communities, particularly the much-disdained exurbs, appear to be on the demographic rise again around the nation. By rejecting this option for the next generation, we are essentially putting the California Dream on ice, all but pushing upwardly mobile, but not rich, families to pursue their futures in notably lower-cost, less-regulated places, like Texas.

All this is for a dubious philosophy that has long derided suburban communities and their single-family homes as an environmentally wasteful, anti-social extravagance. Yet, today, many new suburban developments are eco-friendly, including such features as high-efficiency construction and renewable solar power, and employment patterns increasingly allow for work from home or in nearby firms. Business growth near homes in Irvine, often pilloried as the epitome of sprawl, notes former California State University, Los Angeles demographer Ali Modarres, has resulted in some of the nation’s shortest commutes and highest rates of people working at home.

Add to the equation more fuel-efficient cars and the environmental justification for forced sardinization becomes even less compelling. Densification might well increase over time as some people prefer more urban lifestyles. But the opportunity to own a single-family home should not be limited to the very rich, or to aging baby boomers, by Sacramento bureaucrats and unelected regional planning agencies. Yet, precisely this is the inevitable result of the massive attempt at social engineering now advancing throughout the region and state.

This piece is cross-posted at Citywatchla.com

Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com… where this piece was most recently posted …  and Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is also executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism is now available at Amazon and Telos Press. He lives in Los Angeles, CA

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California Business Needs to Go Small or Go Home

December 18, 2014 By Joel Kotkin 2 Comments

NO ESCAPE FROM THE TAX VICE-Here’s the bitter reality for business in much of California: there’s no cavalry riding to rescue you from the state’s regulatory and tax vise. The voters in California have spoken, and with a definitive, distinctive twist, turned against any suggestion of reform and confirmed the continued domination of the state by public employee unions, environmental activists and their crony capitalist allies.

You are on your own, Southern California businesses, and can count on very little help, and, likely, much mischief, from Sacramento and various lower orders of government. To find a way out of stubbornly high unemployment and anemic income growth, the Southland will need to find a novel way to restart its economic engine based almost entirely on its grass-roots business, its creative savvy and entrepreneurial culture.

This shift poses a great challenge, both for California’s interior counties and parts of the coastal region. Unlike Silicon Valley and its hip twin, San Francisco, no one is investing much in the Southland. Among the nation’s largest metropolitan areas, the Los Angeles region has become a corporate stepchild, trailing in new office construction not only to world-beaters like Houston, but also New York, the Bay Area and even slower-growing Philadelphia or Chicago. In fact, although the second largest metro area in the country, LA-Orange County does not even make the top 10 regions for new building.

Nor can we expect much in the way of residential housing growth, particularly single-family homes, as the state’s planners continue their jihad against anything smacking of suburban expansion.

Traditional industries like aerospace, manufacturing and logistics face enormous regulatory barriers, ruinous taxation levels and huge energy price increases that will slow any potential growth, and could lead to yet more departures by existing large firms. Virtually all the region’s former major established aerospace companies have relocated their headquarters elsewhere, which hurts efforts to get them to expand or maintain facilities here.

Despite all this, the Southland is not without considerable assets. Perhaps most promising is the region’s status as the nation’s No. 1 producer of engineers – almost 3,000 annually. This raw material is now being somewhat squandered, with as many as 70 percent of graduates leaving the area to find work.

But there’s no reason for unmitigated despair; overall, Los Angeles-Orange has increased its ranks of new educated workers ages 25-34 since 2011 as much as ballyhooed New York, San Francisco and much more than Portland, Ore. For its part, the Inland Empire ranked fourth among 52 large metropolitan areas in terms of increased presence of bachelor’s degree-holders in this age group, adding almost 19,000 college-educated people since 2011.

There’s also a case to be made for Southern California as an emerging tech hub. As venture capitalist Mark Shuster points out, the region ranks third, just behind the Bay Area and New York, for its percentage of the nation’s tech startups, and is now the fastest-growing. The overall tech base, which includes aerospace, is still the largest in the country, with more than 360,000 employees. As tech moves from basic infrastructure to application, Shuster argues, the Southland’s time may come.

Despite producing MySpace, the region may have lost out in the social media wars, but shifts in tech trends could turn out to be far more advantageous. This relative optimism is remarkable given the losses in so many key engineering-driven industries over recent decades, from electronics and energy to aerospace.

Southern California’s technology community could well benefit from such things as growing demand for content among tech firms, as well as attempts to reboot space exploration. Indeed, investor Peter Thiel recently suggested that the region’s technology industry is the most “underestimated” in the nation.

“I’d definitely be short New York and long LA,” Thiel told the Los Angeles Times, citing both commercial space pioneer SpaceX and Oculus, the Irvine-based maker of virtual-reality headsets.

The case for a grass-roots rebound of tech in Southern California depends heavily on one key asset – the presence of the nation’s largest community of people in the arts. Roughly half of these workers are self-employed, according to the economic forecasting firm EMSI.

The Silicon Valley may be ideal as a place to nurture digitial technologies, but “nerds” as a whole are not cultural mavens or trend-seekers. They are better at transmitting messages than putting something worthwhile in them. In contrast, Southern California excels in filling messages with product.

The large existing base of television, movie and commercial producers has nurtured skills that are sought worldwide. Yet at the same time, with the studio system clearly in decline, as large productions go elsewhere, digital players such as Netflix, Amazon, Apple, as well as Los Angeles-based Hulu, have become more important. Indeed, when my Chapman students, many of them film majors, discuss their futures, it is increasingly these intermediaries, not the studios, that they identify as critical to a successful career.

This suggests a very different picture of the Southland’s industry than the one normally associated with large companies, studios and deep concentrations of talent. In the future, more production will be done by individuals, sometimes working out of their homes, scattered across the region. According to Kauffman Foundation research, the LA area already has the second-most entrepreneurs per 100 people in the U.S., just slightly behind the Bay Area. By necessity, Southern California’s economy will become more entrepreneurial and grass-roots; even as we have been losing large companies, our percentage growth in self-employed is among the highest in the country.

Not surprisingly, this activity appears concentrated not in the traditional bailiwicks in the San Fernando Valley, or in the hyped Downtown-adjacent areas, but along the coastal strip from Santa Monica to Irvine that some promoters have christened “the tech coast.” This epitomizes the growing role of young individuals and startups – as opposed to veteran engineers – in shaping the Southland’s emerging tech economy.

This pattern, however, is not just restrictive to digital entertainment. Southern California’s network of tested aerospace engineers – which, at 5,000 people, is second only to Seattle’s – is one reason why companies like SpaceX have located here. In an economy that relies more and more on individual expertise, this is a critical advantage.

One powerful caveat: We are not likely to see much blue-collar spinoffs of tech here, due largely to high land, regulatory and energy costs. Space X, for example, may have its key brain power in Southern California, but has chosen to construct its spaceport in lower-cost, business-friendly Texas. Another aerospace firm, Firefly Systems, this year decamped entirely for Texas, moving its headquarters to the Austin area and rocket engine facilities to rural Burnett County.

This pattern suggests that many of our emerging firms may remain somewhat limited in scope and largely focused on high-end functions, which reduces the positive impact for the region’s struggling local middle class and working class.

But the new grass-roots economy does not apply only to tech. Los Angeles has seen a huge rise in the number of people working from home, a percentage that since 1980 has more than tripled even as transit’s ridership share has dropped. Small, home-based businesses are common not only in such fields as real estate, but also in business consulting and even trade.

These home-based businesses, and small ones tucked into strip malls or small industrial centers – for example, in food processing – represent the last, best hope for a revived Southland economy. Our corporate community seems destined to continue shrinking, but this does not necessarily mean that the overall economy has to follow suit. Unable to rely on local officials to make things better, our best chance lies with relying on the entrepreneurial spirit and creativity of our people – the very thing that made us such an economic beacon in decades past.

This article was originally puslibhed on City Watch L.A.

(Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and Distinguished Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University, and a member of the editorial board of the Orange County Register. He is author of The City: A Global History and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. His most recent study,The Rise of Postfamilialism, has been widely discussed and distributed internationally. He lives in Los Angeles, CA. This piece was posted most recently at newgeography.com.)

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Revising History to Fool Taxpayers

December 16, 2014 By Jon Coupal 5 Comments
After Joseph Stalin took the reins of power in the Soviet Union in the mid 1920’s, his image suddenly appeared in paintings of important meetings of the Bolshevik revolutionaries – which was odd because he had attended virtually none of them. Later, after each successive Stalinist purge, group photos that included previously prominent, but now ostracized, imprisoned or executed communists, would be scrubbed, so as to appear that they had never existed.
Of course attempts by politicians to rewrite their history go far beyond just doctoring paintings and photographs.In Washington, D.C. we have the curious case of Jonathan Gruber. During the run-up to Obamacare, both then Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama sang the praises of the roll that MIT professor of economics Jonathan Gruber had played in crafting the legislation. Gruber has been described as the architect of Obamacare and, before that, the similar Romneycare in Massachusetts.Recently, videos surfaced online showing economist Grubber telling groups that the healthcare law had been written specifically in a way to deceive the “stupid” American public so that it would not be clear that it actually contained massive tax increases.When confronted with this evidence, now Minority Leader Pelosi, who famously said that lawmakers had to pass Obamacare to find out what was in it, did her best impression of a deer in the headlights and denied any knowledge of Jonathan Gruber. The president acknowledged Gruber, but dismissed his influence as an insignificant. Both Pelosi’s and Obama’s efforts to downplay Gruber’s role in drafting the Obamacare is so easily disproven by the facts that even the most left leaning journalists are incredulous.

In the recent California General Election, we saw almost humorous efforts by some candidates, who in the past opposed Proposition 13, to recast themselves as champions of the taxpayer protecting measure.

Perhaps the most egregious example occurred in Orange County, where former Assemblyman Jose Solorio was seeking a state Senate seat. Knowing the district included many homeowners, he tried to campaign as a protector of Proposition 13. He was even able to persuade Jerry Brown to record political ads intended to verify Solorio’s Proposition 13 credentials.

Sadly for Solorio and his band of revisionist historians, the Assembly keeps careful records and it was easy for taxpayers to document that he had voted more than once for measures that would have undercut Proposition 13’s taxpayer protections. With the truth out, his candidacy was overwhelmingly rejected by voters.

The lesson here is that when any politician makes claims about his or her record, because of the internet, voters can quickly check to see if they are being told the truth, or if, like Jonathan Gruber, the office seeker believes the public to be stupid.

Revisionists rely on deception and obfuscation. To expose them, it is therefore necessary for the majority of voters to have access to the truth and have the skills to discern its importance. In the words of Thomas Jefferson, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

Jon Coupal is president of the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association — California’s largest grass-roots taxpayer organization dedicated to the protection of Proposition 13 and the advancement of taxpayers’ rights.

This piece was originally published at HJTA.org

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City of Stanton Proposes Higher Taxes Instead of Cutting Pay and Benefits

October 9, 2014 By Ed Ring 1 Comment

On November 4th, voters in Stanton, California, will be asked to vote on a 1 percent sales tax increase, which if approved will raise their sales tax to 9 percent – the highest in Orange County. Nestled in the heart of Orange County, tiny Stanton, a city of barely three square miles in size with a population in 2012 of 38,915 residents, is an unlikely candidate for the spotlight, when California’s local ballots are about to be inundated with over 140 local tax increases affecting many cities and counties that are ten times bigger. But Stanton is ground zero in a battle over how to manage municipal budget deficits, because if their voters approve this tax increase, cities throughout Orange County will follow suit.

We’re not talking small potatoes here. Stanton currently only retains 1 percent (one-eighth) of the 8 percent sales tax they currently collect. According to Stanton’s Consolidated Annual Financial Report for the fiscal year ended 6-30-2013 (page 9), their total sales tax revenue for that year was $3,683,199. If they increase their sales tax rate from 8 percent to 9.0 percent, they should double the amount of sales tax collections retained by the city. A spokesperson for the city of Stanton confirmed they project the new sales tax will add $3.1 million to their projected annual sales tax revenues. How does that compare to their spending?

According to Stanton’s “Measure GG,” the city “now faces a $1.8 million structural budget deficit.” This means the sales tax increase is expected to eliminate their budget deficit with $1.3 million left over. But if you evaluate Stanton’s expenditures, there is an alternative to new taxes. How does the city spend most of their money?

To answer this, again, look no further than the “Whereas” section of Measure GG. The third “Whereas” states “public safety is a top priority in Stanton and represents over 70 percent of the City’s General Fund budget, and without a local funding source the City will be forced to significantly cut public safety services.”

It’s quite clear that Stanton has already cut everything else. Based on information reported to the California State Controller’s Office, in 2012, the City of Stanton had 26 full-time non-safety personnel. Their average base pay was $74,146 per year, with negligible overtime, and “lump sum” payments averaging $4,700 per year, mostly to management. The lowest full-time regular rate of base pay was $42,359 for an administrative clerk. When you pile on the employer payments for retirement health care (average per year $8,691) and for their 2 percent at 55 pensions (average per year $15,693), the total pay and benefits for Stanton’s 26 non-safety employees in 2012 averaged $104,990. Nice work if you can get it. But it represents less than 18 percent of Stanton’s estimated direct personnel costs.

Finding information as to just how much Stanton pays for police and fire protection is not easy, but a reasonably accurate estimate is possible. According to Stanton’s city website under “Fire Services, we learn “there are a total of 21 firefighters who serve the City of Stanton.” Under “Police Services,” we learn “the Sheriff’s Department provides 44 staff members to the City of Stanton.” If we make just one assumption – that the rates of pay earned by the sheriffs and firefighters assigned to Stanton are representative of the rates of pay earned by all Orange County sheriffs and firefighters, we can estimate how much Stanton incurs in direct personnel costs for public safety. Pay for Orange County sheriffs can be found using 2012 data reported by Orange County to the CA State Controller. Pay for Orange County firefighters can be found from 2013 data recently obtained by the California Policy Center directly from the Orange County Fire Authority. Here goes:

OC Public Safety

Based on the data and assumptions as noted, on average, Stanton’s 21 firefighters earn a direct pay and benefits package of $217,956 per year; Stanton’s 44 sheriffs earn an average direct pay and benefits package of $186,682 per year. The source data used for these calculations and others cited in this post can be downloaded here “Stanton_2014_Statistics.xlsx” and readers are invited to point out any errors in calculations or reasoning therein.

There are a lot of takeaways here. For example, if Stanton were to join with other Orange County cities who contract for their police and fire protection and negotiate a 14 percent decrease to the average total pay and benefits their police and firefighters earn, they would eliminate their structural deficit of $1.8 million – and their firefighters would still earn average pay plus benefits, after the reduction, of $187,285 per year, and their sheriffs would still earn average pay plus benefits, after the reduction, of $160,412 per year. The average household income in Stanton during 2012 was $48,146.

A final observation – CalPERS has announced a 50 percent increase in required annual pension contributions, to be phased in between now and 2017. If Orange County’s independent pension system follows suit, and there is no evidence their financial imperatives differ significantly from CalPERS, then Stanton’s annual required pension contributions will increase by $2.2 million per year – nearly all of that for public safety. So even if Measure GG passes, the projected surplus of $1.3 million will probably be more than offset by increased pension contributions. Expect more taxes, or start cutting pay and benefits.

It is always important to emphasize that public safety employees deserve to be paid a premium to compensate for the risks they take to protect the public. But Stanton’s citizens and elected officials, and their counterparts in cities throughout Orange County, will have to decide where to draw the line on that premium. Perhaps the facts should speak for themselves.

Ed Ring is the executive director of the California Policy Center.

 

 

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Rick Perry speaks at rally in Orange County Sept. 8 (part 1)

September 9, 2011 By Videos Leave a Comment

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