Reduces Public Pension and Retirement Health Care Benefits.
A Constitutional Amendment. Summary Date: 8/13/07 Circulation Deadline: 1/10/08 Signatures Required: 694,354 Proponent: Keith Richman, John Moorlach, and Kris Hunt c/o Thomas W. Hiltachk (916) 442-7757.
For peace officers, firefighters, public safety, and other public employees hired after July 1, 2009, this measure: reduces pension and retirement health care benefits; increases minimum retirement age; restricts early retirement; increases minimum age and years of employment needed to qualify for retirement requires public employers to make annual payments to fund future benefit costs; and allows public employers to adjust retirement contribution rates in future labor agreements. Summary of estimate by Legislative Analyst and employees hired on or after July 1, 2009, offset to an unknown extent by increases in costs for other forms of public employee compensation. Major short-term increase in annual governmental payments to prefund retiree health benefits, more than offset in the long run by annual reductions in these costs. (Initiative 07-0024.) (Full Text)
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I work for BART fixing trains and am under CALPERS retirement. This is the worst idea the CA government has come up with in a long time. One of the big draws of government employment is good retirement packages, if this goes through, a lot of well qualified individuals won’t be looking at government jobs because they can get better retirement elsewhere and we’ll get more people that aren’t qualified to do the job they’re hired for just to fill the spots. CALPERS retirement is in no jeopardy of defaulting at all, it is the largest retirement system in the country, and one of the largest in the world. there were a few years where the investments didn’t do as well as planned, but the last 4-5 years has more than made up for that. Administration of the CALPERS system doesn’t cost the state budget anything, it all comes out of employers and employees contributions, which are set by the legislature depending on the particular formula that an agency has. for us at BART besides BART Police it’s a 2.5% at 55 formula, meaning that at 55 years of age if you retire, you get (2.5% * years of service) * average salary over the last 3 years of employment (not including overtime). for me that will be about 65% of my salary if i retire at age 55. that’s much better than any retirement program that i’ve seen in the private sector, if i stay another 5 years the formula changes to about 2.75%, which would give me about 85%. One other thing, a lot of agencies in CALPERS are out of social security BART being one of them, so when i reach age 67.5 (or whatever my SS retirement age is) i won’t be getting much. some people won’t get any from SS because they haven’t gotten their 40 quarters in to qualify for it. as for the retiree health benefits, each agency has to make a plan to pay for that themselves already, BART and it’s unions made a plan during the last contract negotiations to fund the estimated shortfall even tho there is no requirement to do so yet, but it’s coming soon i’m sure.