Those are admittedly conservative estimates. CalPERS' widely acknowledged completely phony numbers are $38 million. The reality likely lies somewhere in between.
The average full-career retiree in Encinitas gets $98,000 per year for life and retires at a much younger age than private sector peers.
They're special.
ReplyDeleteYe Gods! The city is nothing more than a treasure chest for employees. This House of Cards cannot sustain the out of control debt accumulation.
ReplyDeleteThis city is a fiasco......a bunch a maroons.
ReplyDelete8:38
DeleteIs that a joke, or are you a moron?
Good ole Jerome Stocks and his 35% pay and pension increases. Of course the whole council at the time, with the exception of Jim Bond, voted for it. We have been a city for 30 years. We have gone from 110 employees to over 200. What's going to happen 20 years from now?
ReplyDeletePoor House!
DeleteOtherwise known as debt.
ReplyDeleteWe are actually in a better position than our neighboring cities, such as Oceanside, Del Mar, Carlsbad, and Solana Beach. Not that this is acceptable! Just an observation. Also, there is a separate $11k per household debt for County pensions.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.pensiontracker.org/agencyListPrint.php?selYear=2015&varName=field46&agenty_type=&showOnly=1
Yes, a couple of factors there:
Delete1) We are a younger city and so had less time to dig ourselves into a hole. But we're still digging.
2) Oceanside and Carlsbad have police pensions. Fortunately Encinitas pays for sheriff services and the county is responsible for any pension shortfalls.
Again, I'm leaving California in 4 years, just try and come and collect it. Idiots!!
Deletewhy not leave now. I'm sure your home will appreciate in value that exceeds the 11k due.
DeleteWhen a city bankrupts, everything is degraded except for the pensions.
ReplyDeleteAccording to the column, my household owes $6332 to the pension fund. LOLOLLLLOOOOLLLL, yeah, good luck collecting that Muir. 4 more years and I'm outta here....
ReplyDeleteCan the council rescind the 35% increase?
ReplyDeleteCouncil to vote themselves a pay raise tomorrow night....
ReplyDeleteThe City Council can rescind the 35% in one vote for the old timers and the employees then make 35% increase for only the years that it was approved higher. The best part is you would see a flock of the deadwood leave the City if that happens.
ReplyDeletePlease city council do the responsible thing and rescind the 35% bogus Jerome $tock$ windfall raise.
For the umpteenth time, the council voted 4-1 for the 35% pension increase. The four included Maggie Houlihan. Stocks didn't do it by himself, so please stop wrongly attributing it to him. Not that I like the guy, of course, but he wasn't alone in bringing the increase about.
DeleteHoulihan is fawned over because she died. She was not very politically astute, nor did she really contribute anything of significance during her tenure as council person. Her vote to increase pensions 35% discredits her legacy entirely.
DeleteFor the umpeenth time, $tock$ was the ringleader for Dalablabber and Guerin. Houlihan was just a flaming liberal who had no fiscal sense.
ReplyDeleteWhat a trio....$tock$, Dalablabber and Guerin. The drunk following the other drunk, followed by the other drunk. Dumber than shit all three. Is Guerin really a guy dressed like a woman. She looks manish!
ReplyDelete8:48
ReplyDeleteHoulihan should have had enough sense to vote against a 35% pension increase. Stocks did not control her or Bond.
Try reality and objectivity for a change. It might suit you.
Bond was the only one with come sense. Agreed that Houlihan wasn't controlled but also wasn't the smartest person when it came to fiscal matters. Stocks controlled the three stooges - $tocks, Dalablabber, and Guerin.
ReplyDelete$tock$ is the grandfather if the fiscal crisis Encinitas has on its hands today. Hopefully $tocks will move to Oside to partner with his bestie Assream.
The current City Council needs to clean up his mess and repeal the 35% increase and bring all the pensions back down to 2% x no. of years. The City will then only be liable for the years of the 35% increase from 2005 (dumb stocks move) and today.
Repeal it now- end the bleeding!!!
Bond was the only one with common sense. Agreed that Houlihan wasn't controlled but she also wasn't the smartest person when it came to fiscal matters. Stocks controlled the three stooges - $tocks, Dalablabber, and Guerin.
ReplyDelete$tock$ is the grandfather of the fiscal crisis Encinitas has on its hands today. Hopefully $tocks will move to Oside with his bestie boyfreind Assream.
The current City Council needs to clean up his mess and repeal the 35% increase and bring all the pensions back down to 2% x no. of years. The City will then only be liable for the years of the 35% increase from 2005 (dumb stocks move) and today.
Repeal it now- end the bleeding!!!
The Stocks council already rolled back pensions to 2% per year for new employees.
DeleteRolling it back for legacy employees would require an extremely expensive court challenge that could very likely fail. Much easier to fire them than change their pensions.
This is a frustrating silly shell game, and the electorate is partly to blame for letting it go on.
ReplyDeleteFor many many years, elected officials wanted to create the appearance of being tough negotiators and "fiscal conservatives." At the same time, they want to attract and retain good people to perform high quality services for citizens.
So they negotiate hard on current income, because direct payroll is the simpleton electorate's headline number. If you plotted city hall payroll per capita in Encinitas over time, it would be flat to declining--yippie for fiscal conservatism. And in fact, most government workers could easily make more in the private sector, and they know it.
So how does an elected official hold down payroll in the near term ("I'm tough.") and convince good people to work for a city? Simple: bloat the benefits and retirement. To calculate the value of current benefits requires some work and time--work and time that most voters won't invest to call the elected officials on their game.
Bloating the retirement is great for elected officials, because it takes decades to manifest as a serious problem. By that time, the elected official is collecting a pension themselves, and the political fallout is the problem of future elected officials.
It's our fault for falling for it. It's our fault for re-electing leaders who play this game. It's our fault for not insisting that public sector union contract negotiations happen on the level of comprehensive cost of labor (current and future). We should be negotiating a TCOW (look it up) number for different labor tiers, and a model of how the org chart maps to the tiers. Then negotiate the mix of short term payroll vs. benefits vs. retirement variables that make up the TCOW. If the union wants more payroll, fine--it comes at the expense of benefits and retirement.
Thanks EU for keeping a boring and complicated subject in the public eye. It's challenging, but as voters we have dropped the ball. Picking it back up starts with investing the time and effort to become informed.
It's not entirely right to blame the voters. There are too many complex issues for voters to be on top of.
DeleteThe system depends on elected officials being honorable and doing the right thing for the people, not favoring public employees.
Our city manager's total pay package is $300,000 per year, counting a $500 car allowance per month and a $100 cell phone allowance per month. She lives in Olivenhain and works at City Hall.
Where in the private sector do people get that pay, great benefits and outrageous pension for comparable work?
First, your $300K figure (don't know where you got it, or if it's accurate) is a TCOW number, inclusive of salary and benefits.
DeleteWhat I said was that salary is lower in the public sector.
On a straight salary basis, you'd be hard pressed to find someone in the private sector managing an organization of 200 people making a smaller salary.
The point is that the cost of workforce has been shifted such that salary is lower, and benefits and retirement are higher--relative to private sector.
It's the root of the pension problem.
Private sector pays 9 percent higher than public. Also private sector employees have access to social security. Public do not.
DeleteA bigger problem is social security. How many billions is that thing upside down? It also affects many more people than the 200 of public employees in Encinitas...
11:23
DeleteTotal compensation package is what matters, not only salary. That applies in both public and private sectors.
The city manager's compensation package has been in the city records and available to the public since she was hired. You could look it up.
I worked in an org much bigger than the city of Encinitas where people with jobs comparable to the city manager's did not have compensation packages of $300K. And if they underperformed, they were gone.
Maybe you can tell everybody what TCOW stands for.
Indeed. And the $300K actually understates the compensation because it doesn't include the huge pension underfunding.
Delete12:40 And climate change affects many more people than Social Security, but it's not the subject being discussed either.
DeleteWhere's your 9 percent figure from?
The calculation upon which each retiree's pension is based needs to be scrutinized. In the private sector, or at least my private sector pension is based on the average salary (bonuses not included)of the past five years of employment. As I understand Encinitas' calculation, they are using the last year of employment to set the pay-out and allowing many add-ins (unused vacation, sick days, etc.)to balloon the pay-out. This gaming of the system, while done by employees in many cities, is a significant part of the problem.
ReplyDeleteYou are in the private sector and you have a pension??!?!?
DeleteYou are very fortunate!
- The Sculpin
My private sector pension is 0.33% of Muir's and I've never been morbidly obese.
DeleteSculpin - I worked for a European company... all hires in the US after 2005 were not eligible and were left with a 401 savings plan (hardly the same as the pension). With people living so long, pensions are not viable... The City of Encinitas needs to face the reality and stop saddling residents with the liability or at least rein it in.
DeleteTo Sculpin's point, most private sector retirement plans haven't tinkered with payout formulas. They have scraped the defined-benefit programs entirely in favor of defined-contribution (401k) plans.
DeleteTinkering with the formulas probably isn't the way to go.
If you retire at 65 and pass at 75 what is the point? If you pass at 120, then I see the problem. Any idea on when public sector employees pass? I bet it is younger than the male/female population. Some of them look dead already.
Delete@11:27 - Why wouldn't "tinkering" be the way to go? If unused sick days or unused vacation days are not allowed in the calculation, the baseline pay-out would be less vulnerable to "gaming". If the retiree is allowed to add 20+ years of unused sick days to their last year, their last year salary and subsequently their life-time pay-out balloons. Tinkering is needed!
DeleteIt doesn't fix the basic problem that the risk of invested returns falls on the taxpayers.
DeleteDefined benefit plans (pensions) have a fixed payout commitment, and the amount taxpayers pony up is variable, based on investment returns. If the market tanks at the wrong time, or the investors at CalPERS do a bad job, then taxpayers are obligated to pay more tax dollars to make the pensioners whole.
A 401k flips that risk to the retiree. The contribution to the retirement account is fixed, and the income after retirement is variable based on the investment returns in the account. The taxpayers are asked to pay a fair amount into the accounts of public sector employees--what happens after that is up to the worker.
If they are smart, they could end up retiring even earlier, and with more income than the current generous pension system.
Good on 'em them if that happens.
Yeah but Encinitas employees don't have sick hours, they have IPPs. They are useless if you leave. So I don't think that is an issue here. No balloon.
DeleteYou can cash out on vacation. Can anyone confirm if this is included?
@3:00 - there is no way that a 401k can provide anywhere near the amount that a defined benefit pension can... sorry. Most defined pension programs - or at least mine, also had a savings component with single digit company matched contributions. When the pension is ended, the the employee - left only with their 401k is exposed to market movements and is without the pension baseline / safety net. Whatever happens with the market, they will have less money than if they had a pension.
ReplyDelete@3:01 - thanks for the info on sick days - some cities in the Midwest allowed sick days to be added or were used to provide a "backdrop" / lump sum, end of career payment.
TCOW = Total Costs of Workforce
ReplyDelete5:13,
ReplyDeleteI agree that the average worker would do better under defined benefit. There is no free lunch, and defined contribution plans are cheaper for the employer.
Shifting to defined contribution plans would represent a cut in benefits that should be balanced with a bump in salary. That's what the private sector did two decades ago. Public sector compensation system should mimic what goes on in cometetive crucible of the private sector.
That includes performance bonuses. Every department and role should have compensation tied to efficiency, productivity, and customer Sat/DSat scores. We should be asking citizens for their feedback after every transaction and reward the best performers.
Uber does it--no reason city staff can't too.
It's at every level, Federal, State and City! The Progressive financial recklessness will bankrupt the country yet they still keep spending! They will find a way to tax more into every account to fuel the social give a way program. Ya lets make everything free in CA especially healthcare and make it illegal to verify citizenship. Its only $450B budget on the State which is in trouble now! I guess I get to work until I'm 85 then SS will be bankrupt!
ReplyDelete