Last year 19 of California’s 55 members of the U.S. Congress drew pensions from a state-backed public retirement plan, according to a CalWatchdog.com analysis of financial disclosures for the year 2013.

Payments from 2013 – the last reported year available – came from municipal, education and state pension funds and ranged from annual payouts of $3,800 to $70,000. Four members take payments from two or more public pension funds.

The top recipient was Rep. Lois Capps, who collected a total of $70,049 in 2013 – $20,615 from the California State Teachers Retirement System and $49,434 from the University of California Retirement System.

The 77-year-old lawmaker from Santa Barbara is a former instructor at Santa Barbara City College. Capps has been receiving the dual pensions since 1998, when she first was elected.

Members of Congress receive a salary of $174,000. They are not prohibited from taking their taxpayer-subsidized retirement while serving in Washington.

Taking a state pension while serving in Congress is hardly noticed “because it happens in so many different layers that people aren’t tracking it,” said Steve Ellis, vice president for the Washington D.C.-based Taxpayers for Common Sense.

“And besides, the people who are getting this kind of information are the people who would be getting these payments in the future.”

He added that the system has no rules prohibiting what detractors call “double-dipping.”

“All of us are paying two sets of employees, one working and one retired,” Ellis said.

Executive benefits

But pensions are part of the compensation package, like any job in the private sector, insists Steve Maviglio, a California political consultant who represents unions that back public pensions.

“It’s like an executive who hops from one job to another,” Maviglio said. “Should they have to give up the benefits from a previous job?”

Besides, he said, “We’re trying to attract the best and the brightest to be public servants and if they are forced to give up the benefits they’ve earned at a previous job, it would kill that incentive [to serve].”

In addition to the 19 pensioners in the state’s Washington delegation, nine members note on their disclosures that they hold an interest in a public pension but are not yet taking the money.

The pension funds tapped include the County of San Mateo, which paid Rep. Anna Eshoo $12,020 for her time on the board of supervisors from 1982 to 1992; and Marin County, where Sen. Barbara Boxer drew $4,456 for serving on the county board of supervisors from 1976 to 1982. Boxer has announced her retirement beginning in Jan. 2017.

Rep. Scott Peters, 56, who served on the San Diego City Council from 2000 to 2008, noted on his disclosure that he received a $20,703 annual pension from the San Diego City Employees’ Retirement System, but donated it to the San Diego Library Department.

CalPERS and CalSTRS

The majority of the pension draws came from the state’s California Public Employees’ Retirement System, which administers the Legislators’ Retirement System. CalPERS covers members of the statehouse first elected prior to Nov. 1990, when voters passed Proposition 140. The initiative canceled pensions for future legislators and imposed term limits. The California Public Employees’ Pension Reform Act of 2013 took effect in January 2013 and greatly altered the plan, as well as major educator pension arrangements.

The California State Teachers Retirement System also is a major provider of pension income for U.S. lawmakers. And some, such as Rep. Michael Honda, get something from both sources.

Honda, 73, reported income of $38,135 from CalSTRS and $13,393 from CalPERS, plus $12,754 from the teacher system as part of a deceased-spouse family allowance.

Still others have not yet tapped their pension funds and report the accrued benefits as unearned income or an asset. Those funds are allowed to be reported in a broad range as the asset is seen with the potential for growth or reduction.

Rep. Judy Chu reports her pension with CalSTRS has a value of between $100,001 and $250,000 and her CalPERS fund between $1,001 and $15,000.

Chu, 61, served on the Monterey Park City Council and taught in the Los Angeles Community College District.

Rep. Tony Cardenas reported he will receive a pension from the city of Los Angeles when he turns 55, in 2018. His payout, he noted, is an “undetermined amount.”

Some members of the California delegation have seen their payments grow over the years at a rate outpacing standard interest returns for their funds.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s $55,690 pension payout in 2013 from her days as a member of the Board of Supervisors and mayor of San Francisco has grown 36 percent since 2002, when she collected $40,929. Her draw is based on 18 years of work ending in 1988. Her 2002 pension pay was equal to between $53,000 and $62,500 in 2013, according to a relative-worth calculation.

Feinstein, 81, first was elected to San Francisco city office in 1969.

Then there are the benefits that are too good to give up.

Even though federal lawmakers are privy to some generous health insurance, including dental care, former Rep. Lynn Woolsey, who retired in 2013 after 20 years in Congress, reported she still carried her vision and dental care from her days as a member of the Petaluma City Council from 1984 to 1993.

Steve Miller can be reached at: 517-775-9952 and avalanche50@hotmail.com. His website is: http://avalanche50.com/.

Instead of calling for the governor and the Legislature to sharply increase its annual payments to the funds responsible for these liabilities, Taylor called for relatively slight increases phased in for years — increases that are far short of what an actuary would recommend.

It’s as if a family declared its finances to be in great shape so long as one ignored the $500,000 in credit-card debts.

What makes the LAO’s current insanity so tough to figure out? The fact that at other times, the LAO makes powerful arguments that completely counter the budget assertions Taylor offered last month.

LAO: CalSTRS’ debt much worse than Brown’s ‘wall of debt’

For one example, this is from Ed Mendel’s piece on Calpensions.com in March of this year:

“The nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office yesterday recommended that the Legislature adopt a plan to fully fund CalSTRS in 30 years — an estimated cost of $4.5 billion a year, a hefty addition to current annual contributions totaling $5.7 billion. …

“… after years of ignoring a growing CalSTRS debt … the Assembly and Senate public employee retirement committees held a joint hearing yesterday on proposed solutions requested by a Senate resolution last year.

“Ryan Miller of the Legislative Analyst’s Office told the committee that the unfunded liability of the California StateTeachers Retirement System, a century old this year, ‘may be the state’s most difficult fiscal challenge.’

“The analyst said the CalSTRS unfunded liability is twice the size of what Gov. Brown calls ‘the wall of debt’ from years of budgetary borrowing. The governor’s proposed budget spends $56 billion on K-12 funding under the Proposition 98 guarantee.”

Let’s contrast that with what Mac Taylor said three weeks ago in Sacramento at a legislative hearing.

“’The state’s budgetary condition is stronger than at any point in the past decade. … The state’s structural deficit – in which ongoing spending commitments were greater than projected revenues – is no more.’”

Does LAO staffer have a bloody lip?

Huh? So paying the actuarial minimum for retirement benefits that are contractually guaranteed and protected by a welter of state laws isn’t a “spending commitment”?

What’s going on in Sacramento? Is there something in the Capitol water supply? Psilocybin, perhaps?

I wonder how the LAO staffer who correctly warned the Legislature about CalSTRS’ horrible finances in March deals with his boss’s denial and declining math skills. Does he have to bite his lip to keep quiet when Mac talks of budget surpluses as far as the eye can see? Does he chant “om” to maintain his mental equilibrium? Does he furtively scan the jobs.ca.gov site so he can get away from the Lunatic Analyst’s Office?

I’m not being completely facetious here at all. This was the official position of the LAO when the staff was doing the talking, not the boss:

“If the state’s current $1.4 billion annual contribution to CalSTRS were combined with the $4.5 billion additional contribution that may be necessary to achieve full funding in 30 years, the sum would exceed state spending on the University of California and California State University systems combined. The additional CalSTRS contribution alone would represent about one-half of state corrections spending.”

Now the LAO’s position has become “the state’s structural deficit … is no more.”

Wow. And a whole bunch of other less-family-friendly exclamations.

By John Seiler

As Ed Ring notes today, the state of California has run up a “Wall of Debt” of $1.126 trillion. That’s $1,126,000,000,000,000.00.

There are 38 million Californians. So it comes to $29,632 per person, including newborn babies.

A large chunk of that debt has been run up by the California Teachers’ Retirement System. According to a March 20 report by the Legislative Analyst, CalSTRS alone suffers “Unfunded Liabilities of About $70 billion.”

But look what CalSTRS features on the front of its Web page: a picture of a little baby, just starting out on life in California.

Supposedly the baby somehow is helped by CalSTRS. Strangely, CalSTRS asks the baby, “How Will You Spend Your Future?”

The little baby is laughing, so he has no idea what his nightmare future will be: Working 50 years to pay off the massive debt to CalSTRS and the rest of the California Wall of Debt.

By Jennifer Kerns

Last spring, three Maryland co-workers won the Mega Millions lottery and, as the old saying goes, it couldn’t have happened to nicer people.

Lotto officials announced that three public school employees struck it rich with a $200 Million winning ticket. The trio called themselves “the three amigos” and were described by Lottery officials as “the kind of people you hoped would win.”  Apparently they had all struggled with bills in this down economy.

But one doesn’t necessarily need to buy a lottery ticket to win big. Forget Maryland.

If you’re a public school employee in California, chances are you’ve probably already hit the jackpot.

California ranks number one in the highest pensions for public employees — outranking even New York and New Jersey.  Here there are a whopping 856,000 teachers and other school personnel across 1,900 districts currently within the California State Teachers Retirement System. The average pension for each of those teachers in California is $1 million over a 20-year period. Which means we have created a “millionaire teachers” class within the California economy.

Some school administrators take home $200,000-per-year pensions. And as reported recently by the Associated Press, some of those administrators have taken advantage of a little-known retention plan to take lump sum cash payouts of $147,000 on top of those already-bloated pensions. These are the kind of winnings one could only get through a lottery — or, as we say in California, just your average day at the school playground.

Prop. 30

As if that weren’t enough, Californians are now being asked to approve yet another tax increase through Proposition 30, thanks to Gov. Jerry Brown and the teachers’ unions. However, even as the governor and his friends are selling this ticket to voters as a way to increase funding for schools, the California School Boards Association admits revenue raised from the governor’s ballot initiative won’t go to classrooms. It would actually go into California’s General Fund, making the odds very high that new revenue from Prop. 30 would go toward more bloated pensions and more government spending. After all, all government money is fungible.

In fact, David Crane asserts that 100 percent of the revenues from Prop. 30 will go to pensions (mostly due to investment shortfalls since the Great Recession).  You sure wouldn’t know it by reading the Prop. 30 propaganda. Crane, a Democrat, is a finance expert and a former economic adviser to then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Finally, speaking of lotteries, California’s own lottery once promised to save education.  The California Lottery has provided a whopping $24 billion to public schools since 1985, yet schools are still failing.

Why? Because time has proven that simply throwing money at a system won’t solve the problems.  Lawmakers haven’t trimmed the necessary fat from the budget and they haven’t allowed reforms — not even the simple act of allowing competitive bidding on services such as lawn care. And they’ve done virtually nothing on pension reform. To this day, classrooms continue to hang in the balance, relying upon the “lottery” that is our ballot box in order to find out where their next round of funding will come from.

Come Nov. 6, voters will determine whether or not they believe Brown’s Prop. 30 is not the winning ticket for California.

Jennifer Kerns is a taxpayer advocate and communications strategist.  Over the last 10 years, she has served as a media consultant to the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, as an Assistant Secretary of State for California, as Senior Press Secretary for former Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner, and as the former Spokeswoman for the California Republican Party. Kerns is the only Press Secretary to unanimously win every single newspaper endorsement for a Republican Statewide candidate in California. She can be reached at Jennifer@JenniferKerns.com. 

By Steven Greenhut

SACRAMENTO — California’s public schools continue to lay off teachers, in a process that is as convoluted and illogical as one would expect in a bureaucratic system in which the needs of the students falls fairly low on the list of priorities. That’s my takeaway from a new report by the state’s Legislative Analyst’s Office detailing the teacher layoff process as districts struggle with declining revenue in the face of shrinking budgets.

The big issue, however, isn’t the arcane process for shedding teachers, but what the process says about the inefficient way that most Americans have decided to educate their kids. As the LAO reports, decisions about who stays and who goes are based on which teachers have showed up to work for the most years — i.e., seniority — rather than which ones are most effective and energetic. The hearing and appeals process, by which every laid-off teacher gets an automatic hearing, adds enormous costs to a system that always claims to lack enough resources.

The LAO report only looked at one small, technical aspect of the public-school behemoth, and it was meant to offer a little advice for tweaking the layoff process. It wasn’t meant to provide a thorough analysis of school systems. But in some ways, that’s what is so frightening about the report. Americans don’t think twice about the way schools are designed. Few things are more important than educating children, yet we accept this current system the way Soviet citizens accepted long bread lines. No doubt, auditors in that system issued reports discussing ways to shorten the lines.

‘Underfunded’?

Don’t include me in the chorus of those who claim that the schools are somehow “underfunded,” even as K-14 education consumes more than 40 percent of California’s general-fund budget — not to mention all the local bond measures and federal funding. School-district budget “cuts” usually refer to a reduced rate of spending growth, not actual cuts.

One of the nation’s worst-performing systems, Los Angeles Unified School District, yearly spends more than $29,000 per student, when all funding sources are included, according to a Cato Institute report. Its graduation rate of 40 percent is appalling.

LAUSD is particularly bad, but it isn’t run that differently than your average suburban district.

Consider the LAO’s chart of a declining teacher workforce over the past few years against this report in the Los Angeles Daily News from 2008: “[A] Daily News review of salaries and staffing shows LAUSD’s bureaucracy ballooned by nearly 20 percent from 2001 to 2007. Over the same period, 500 teaching positions were cut and enrollment dropped by 6 percent. The district has approximately 4,000 administrators, managers and other nonschool-based employees — not including clerks and office workers — whose average annual salary is about $95,000.”

Now consider this tidbit in June 2011 from the Sacramento Bee: “The number of educators receiving $100,000-plus annual pensions jumped 650 percent from 2005-11, going from 700 to 5,400, according to a Bee review of data from the California State Teachers’ Retirement System.”

Here’s a Los Angeles Times headline from October: “California teachers lack the resources and time to teach science.”

Is this an issue of money or spending priorities?

Instead of focusing on the little things, Californians ought to be thinking big thoughts about education. We can start by asking: Is the public education system one that best serves the students? The answer, even for people whose kids attend decent schools is, “Obviously not.”

There’s an endless call for reform. Some ideas are useful. For instance, tuition vouchers, which let people take a portion of their school tax dollars and spend them at the school of their choice, or charter schools, which are government-controlled schools freed from some of the government-imposed red tape, offer some hope because they provide some level of competition.

Thought Experiment

I’m not calling for specific reforms here but arguing, instead, for readers to conduct a thought experiment.

If we were tasked with providing an important service, how would we provide it? If, say, we were asked to create the best possible chain of restaurants to serve hungry customers, would we buy a huge building, hire scores of extremely well-paid administrators and then impose a tax on local residents to fund the chain? Would we let a board of directors, elected from the community, choose the décor, the menu and the locations?

Would we empower a union to make hiring decisions and allow it to grant tenure to waiters and kitchen help, so that we could not fire them even if they were lazy and incompetent? Would we pay the most money to people who worked there the longest rather than to those who were the best workers?

When customers complained that we served too much meat and not enough pizza, would we shrug and ask them to elect board members who preferred pepperoni to cheeseburgers?

Would we pass laws mandating that people who live in neighborhoods near our restaurants eat only there — allowing them to eat elsewhere only if they spend additional money or move to the neighborhood where the restaurant more closely meets their taste? Would we ignore the pleas of people who live near filthy restaurants that serve lousy food just because we live near one that at least keeps a clean kitchen and offers adequate meal choices?

Other observers have made similar analogies, and school officials always claim that schooling somehow is different. But it isn’t.

Instead of tinkering around the edges and endlessly fighting for reforms that offer little hope of transforming the system, we need to redesign it from the ground up. Perhaps we should, in the words of the lateschool  reformer Marshall Fritz, “separate school and state” and allow the market to provide schools just as we allow it to provide food and other vital services.