By grossly overpaying and over-pensioning our police, we have a slower response time with fewer cops. If you want to dredge up the SB terrorist attack as an plug for your high pay, let’s consider ALL the aspects of overpaying our cops — who didn’t show up in time.

FACT: Average California firefighter paid 60% more than paid firefighters in other 49 states. CA cops paid 56% more. CA 2011 median household income (including gov’t workers) is 13.4% above nat’l avg. http://www.tinyurl.com/CA-ff-and-cop-pay and http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_income

VERY illuminating!!! Thanks.

Of course, you “illumination” is PRECISELY what the public employee labor unions and their political allies desperately seek to avoid. They live and thrive in the shadows — no thanks to the ignorant and too often compliant press.

Again, thanks for the explanation.

GOOD NEWS !!!! NTHEOC !!!!

Richard,

It is treated as if their retirement contributions are $0 for every employee.

The averages reported by the SCO are extremely inaccurate, for multiple reasons.

1. Cities such as LA and San Diego do not report pension contributions, the SCO treats them as if their pension costs are $0. So the $703 million in retirement and health costs for LA is for health only. Retirement costs from their actuarial reports are an additional $1.2B.

2. The SCO reports by position, not employee. Anyone holding multiple positions will have a $0 retirement and health cost for their 2nd position, resulting in an “average” amount 50% less than what they actually received.

3. The averages are not by employee, they are by rows of data on the SCO report. There are agencies that contain rows with $0 in wages and $0 in benefits for the 2014 year, which is clearly not a city employee. Nonetheless, it is factored into the average as if it is.

These averages should be totally disregarded as they are not accurate. Perhaps the only thing they reveal is which agencies have the most number of blank rows or interns/volunteers/day laborers with less than $1000 in wages for the year.

For example,

I went to the Corte Madera city page on their site and it says “average retirement/health cost: $17,226”.

So I download their own file for, and without doing anything to the file Excel says the average cost is $46,900!

How can this be?

Well, when you download the file all the $0 values turn into dashes, which Excel automatically ignored when computing averages. You’d actually have to manually change those dashes back into zeroes to get the values they are reporting!

I CONTINUE TO LIVE IN THE POODLE’S TINY BRAIN!!!!!!

I love it! I hope he does not charge rent—– it’s empty up here!!

It means even Teddy Steals can get a GED job paying $200K per year if it is in Fantasy-land of government employment.