Southern Californians who received cash rebates for replacing their lawns with drought-tolerant landscaping will soon get a federal tax form in the mail reporting the amount, but water officials said Thursday it is still not clear whether the reimbursement will be taxable.

 

Officials from the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California — which funded a $340 million incentive program — say they are sending 1099 forms to turf rebate recipients of $600 or more and leaving reporting up to participants and their tax advisers.

 

“We’re doing what we believe is our obligation, which is sending the 1099s,” said Deven Upadhyay, an MWD manager. Recipients “would have to work with their own tax adviser in terms of the way that they might characterize it in terms of the way they file their own taxes.”

 

This would affect most of those who received rebates, Upadhyay said, though he did not give an exact number. The average residential rebate totals about $3,000, according to MWD data. In some cases, residents received rebates of more than $70,000.

 

MWD spokesman Bob Muir said the agency believes the rebates should be “tax-free.”

 

California provides a tax exemption for turf removal rebates, but the federal tax code provides an exemption only for rebates related to energy efficiency, officials said.

‘Strategic’ water conservation promoted

The peculiarity here is that the federal government has been formally committed to promoting water conservation for decades, since long before warnings about the West’s expected “mega-drought” began. This is from a 1998 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency overview of federal conservation policy:

The Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA, 42 U.S.C. 300j-15), as amended in 1996, requires the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to publish guidelines for use by water utilities in preparing a water conservation plan. …

 

These Water Conservation Plan Guidelines are addressed to water system planners but use of the Guidelines is not required by federal law or regulation. States decide whether or not to require water systems to file conservation plans consistent with these or any other guidelines. …

 

The infrastructure needs of the nation’s water systems are great. Strategic use of water conservation can help extend the value and life of infrastructure assets used in both water supply and wastewater treatment, while also extending the beneficial investment of public funds through the SRF and other programs.

L.A. controller calls program a ‘gimmick’

But there’s another twist to this story. The MWD program that many L.A. and water officials want to be federal tax-free doesn’t appear to be very effective, according to a Los Angeles city audit released in November:

Los Angeles’ turf rebate program saved less water per dollar spent than other Department of Water and Power conservation programs, an audit released by the city controller said Friday.

 

Auditors found that money spent for rebates on items such as high-efficiency appliances yielded a water savings almost five times higher than turf replacement. …

 

City Controller Ron Galperin called on the water provider to focus its conservation programs in order to achieve more sustained and cost-effective water savings. …

 

In fiscal year 2014-15, the DWP spent $40.2 million on customer incentive and rebate programs, Galperin’s office said. Nearly $17.8 million of that went to turf rebates. Each dollar invested in turf rebates is expected to save 350 gallons of water over the estimated 10-year “life expectancy” of residential turf replacement, the audit said.

 

In comparison, the department spent $14.9 million on rebates for high-efficiency appliances and fixtures. Those rebates yield a per-dollar savings of more than 1,700 gallons of water over their estimated lifetimes of up to 19 years, Galperin’s office said.

 

The turf rebate program “had value as a gimmick that … probably spurred a heightened awareness,” Galperin said at a news conference, adding: “It’s the job of my office to look at return on investment.”

That’s from a Nov. 20 Times story.

The mood of the public and officials alike has tilted hard against outsized consumers. Although “water providers such as the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power have refused to divulge the names of California’s top residential water users,” the Los Angeles Times reported, “the DWP is now considering changes to its water conservation ordinance that would impose ‘substantial’ fines for excessive use and make the names public.”

Pressed by “public outrage, and questioning by Los Angeles City Councilman Paul Koretz,” the Times noted, DWP would follow in the East Bay’s footsteps, where agency overusers recently confronted “an excessive-use penalty ordinance that allows it to fine and name water customers who consume more than four times the average household.”

From nagging to snitching

In the Bay Area, a culture of water shaming has developed from the ground up. In a report on “the domestic water police,” the New York Times recently identified “moms and dads, spouses and partners, children, even co-workers and neighbors” as among the residents “quick to wag a finger when they spot people squandering moisture, such as a faucet left running while they’re brushing their teeth, or using too much water to clean dinner plates in the sink. And showers? No lingering allowed.”

More nagging has gone hand in hand with more snitching. The Times reported that “state water agencies issued more than 70,000 warnings for overuse and more than 20,000 penalties” this June and July, with many issued when “someone’s neighbor ratted on them,” according to State Water Resources Control Board climate and conservation manager Max Gomberg.

Although those penalties landed on a relatively small group of die-hard squanderers, the state has now leveled substantial fines on whole cities that failed to meet conservation targets. “While most communities continue to hit mandated conservation targets, a few have consistently missed,” the Sacramento Bee noted. “All four were in Southern California: Beverly Hills, Indio, Redlands and Coachella Valley Water District. Each was fined $61,000.”

These sums could be only the beginning. “The penalties are based on the board’s authority to issue fines of $500 per day for violations of its emergency regulation,” according to the Press-Enterprise. “The board could also issue the providers a cease and desist order, which carries a fine up to $10,000 per day for non-compliance.”

A vicious circle

The crackdown has come as agencies have hiked rates for users who do conserve. “Water providers in Los Angeles, the San Francisco Bay Area and other parts of the state have recently told customers that rates will go up at least temporarily, as utilities struggle to pay for building and repairing pipes, buying water and other costs, even as customers cut back,” according to Reuters. Agencies have sometimes wound up a victim of their own success. “In Los Angeles, conservation led to a $111 million drop in revenues during the fiscal year that ended July 1, a period mostly before the mandatory cutbacks kicked into high gear, Department of Water and Power budget director Neil Guglielmo said Friday.”

But for now, regulators have tried to emphasize the positive. “Californians slashed their water use 26 percent in September, meeting Gov. Jerry Brown’s goal of 25 percent for the fourth straight month,” the San Francisco Chronicle reported, citing recently released state data. Though encouraged by the numbers, water agencies have strained to strike a messaging balance between threats and warnings on the one hand and encouragement and pride on the other, hoping to give savers a sense of reward without subtly encouraging a return to laxity. Utilities, noted the Chronicle, remained dedicated to “trying to keep the conservation message front and center after four dry years, especially as residents may be tempted to become less diligent with forecasts calling for a wetter-than-average winter.”

But the honeymoon could be over for millions of Southern California residents served by municipal utilities. Moody’s Investors Service warns they will be hard-hit by the state’s latest edict on increased use of renewable energy to supply electricity:

On Oct.. 7, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill requiring all California utilities to generate 50 percent of the electricity they sell to retail customers from renewable energy by 2030. The legislation will be credit negative for municipal utilities if ratepayers balk at higher prices that come with the transition to renewable energy from coal-fired generation.

 

Municipal electric utilities in Southern California would be particularly affected given their reliance on coal-fired generation. Coal-fired generation has historically supplied cities like Los Angeles and Anaheim with more than 40 percent of their electricity. In contrast, Northern California cities such as San Francisco and Sacramento derive all of their electricity from sources other than coal such as solar, hydroelectricity and natural gas.

 

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and other Southern California municipal utilities have thus far managed the shift to other sources from coal without major ratepayer protest, allowing them to increase rates and maintain a sound financial performance. But Los Angeles ratepayers are facing a likely 3.4 percent annual water and power rate increase over the next five years to help support the further transition to cleaner energy.

 

For utilities, the Clean Energy and Pollution Reduction Act of 2015 increases the percentage of electricity coming from renewable energy to 50 percent by 2030 up from the current 33 percent by 2020. We expect the utilities will meet the 33 percent requirement. However, ratepayer affordability and technical challenges will become increasingly difficult as utilities reach towards the more significant 50 percent renewable standard.

Infrastructure costs also likely to buffet ratepayers

Moody’s says another factor could also yield future rate shocks:

[Municipal] utilities will face another major challenge in whether the transmission grid can adequately handle the intermittent renewable resources that will begin to dominate California’s power supply mix. LADWP benefits from owning and operating its transmission system and has variable resources such as a pumped storage facility and gas-fired units to balance the system. The city of Anaheim recently added the Canyon natural gas fired unit and Southern California Public Power Authority financed the Magnolia unit in Burbank to help compensate for shortfalls in solar or wind energy. In the long term, the need to successfully integrate more renewables into the grid will likely require similar additional capital investment.

But while customers of the region’s two giant investor-owned utilities — Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric — won’t be as hard hit by the latest state edict, they will also pay unique bills in coming years not borne by customers of municipal utilities. Unless a California Public Utilities Commission decision is overturned, customers of the two utilities will pick up 70 percent of the $4.7 billion cost of shuttering the broken San Onofre nuclear power plant. SCE owns 80 percent of the plant, SDG&E 20 percent.

Detailing the plan, MarketWatch reported that “Angelenos must save another 16 percent for the year ahead, the water board said,” despite saving over 9 billion gallons, or 7 percent, over the previous year:

“By comparison, San Francisco lowered its water usage (22,351 gallons per resident) between June 2014 and February 2015 by more than 1.6 billion gallons, a saving of 8 percent from the same period a year earlier. As such it has just an 8 percent target water reduction for the 2015-2016 period, the state said.

“San Diego, which depends on water imported from outside of the city for 90 percent of its usage, must cut back on demand in the next year by 16 percent, the state water board said.”

Meanwhile, the 4th District Court of Appeal in Orange County sided with a challenge to the constitutionality of San Juan Capistrano’s tiered water pricing system. As the San Jose Mercury News reported, the court held that tiered rates “violated voter-approved Proposition 218, which prohibits government agencies from charging more for a service than it costs to provide it.”

A blow to Brown

For Gov. Jerry Brown, the ruling was an instant headache. He had recently issued an executive order, The Los Angeles Times noted, “directing water agencies to develop rate structures that use price signals to force conservation.”

In a prepared statement issued by the governor’s office in the wake of the ruling, Brown did not shy away from making his frustration plain. “The practical effect of the court’s decision is to put a straitjacket on local government at a time when maximum flexibility is needed,” he said, invoking a bottom-up view of political efficacy most often associated with Republicans. “My policy is and will continue to be: Employ every method possible to ensure water is conserved across California.”

Making waves

As CalWatchdog.com previously observed, the sweeping ramifications of the case put regulators and cities on edge. Providers could fall back on technicalities to make increased consumption more costly — charging more for water drawn from certain areas, for instance — the bureaucratic challenge involved in finding and implementing workarounds could be substantial. According to the Times, experts surmised that between two-thirds and four-fifths of water agencies in California charged tiered rates for usage.

Especially in Southern California, the ruling has thrown a monkeywrench into major plans for an overhaul of the tier system. “The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power currently uses a two-tier rate structure, but agency officials have said they are preparing to roll out a revised system that would employ four tiers and that would make high water use even more costly than it is now,” the Times reported.

Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies, told the Sacramento Bee that the ruling was currently under legal review by attorneys. But plaintiffs’ attorney Benjamin Benumof told the Bee that, on their view, government could effectively promote conservation by, for instance, increasing rebates for low-flow appliances and devices.

A turn to penalties

An approach utilized in Santa Cruz offered perhaps the quickest option for municipalities straining to meet new standards without tiered rate pricing. There, the Mercury News reported, the city’s recently reinstated mandatory rationing program hits high users with a flat $50 fee per “unit” of consumption in excess of 11 units:

“That fee, which sent some water guzzlers’ bills skyrocketing, will not be affected by Monday’s court ruling, however, said Rosemary Menard, Santa Cruz’s water director, because it is clearly labeled a “penalty” in the city ordinance, and is not used to pay for daily operations of the water system.” 

Utility pressure

In Los Angeles, for example, public utility officers have sought in vain for leniency from Sacramento. “We have voiced concern that we’re not getting credit for our track record,” Marty Adams, director of water operations at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, told Al Jazeera America. “Whatever the state water board decides in early May will not change the fact that the Metropolitan Water District, southern California’s water supplier, plans to vote next week to ration water it sells to 26 cities, including Los Angeles,” it reported.

In a decision affecting some 19 million residents from L.A. County to Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego and Ventura counties, the Metropolitan Water District recently voted in “cutbacks that would slash supplies to its member cities and agencies by 15 percent,” according to NBC4 Los Angeles.

“The cuts in water allocation to local districts were approved by an MWD committee on Monday and the full board Tuesday. The move marks only the fourth time the MWD has cut back on supplying water.”

“Southern California has led the way in water conservation for more  than 20 years, and now we’re asking people to do significantly more,” said chairman Randy Record, according to NBC4. “We know it will be difficult, but we’re in an unprecedented drought.”

Notwithstanding years of conservation, both L.A. and its surrounding areas have had to propose twisting the taps tighter — even though, Fox News reported, “the governor’s order directs the State Water Resources Control Board to take such efforts into consideration in setting specific reduction goals.” Under Brown’s orders, “the State Water Resources Control Board released draft reduction targets for more than 400 water agencies that must cut their water use by anywhere from 10 percent to 35 percent. The targets are based on per-capita water use.”

Court controversy

For one group of Southern California residents, however, the new rules proved too much to take. In San Capistrano, plaintiffs filed a lawsuit challenging the use of tiered water pricing. The prospect of a favorable ruling from the Orange County appeals court currently deciding the case has put observers and officials on edge, as the Los Angeles Times reported:

“If the 4th District Court of Appeal rules in favor of the plaintiffs, water districts that use similar tiered rate structures could be sued on similar grounds if they don’t change how they charge. Water districts located in appeals districts outside of Orange County would not technically be bound by the decision, but water lawyers are likely to rely on it as they argue future cases[.]”

The suit has placed the decisions of both the DWP and MWD at risk. But according to experts, the Times suggested, the utilities could choose to rejigger pricing according to the source of residents’ water.

Fracking safe

One usage of water that Brown has decided to defend, however, is fracking. Faced with environmentalist criticism over the practice, which forces water deep into the ground to break up rock that prevents drilling access (hence its full name, hydraulic fracturing.) Although critics have blamed fracking for using up to 70 million gallons of water last year, Brown has insisted that the practice impacts the drought in a minor way.

“Fracking in California has been going on for more than 50 years,” Brown told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press. “It uses a fraction of the water of fracking on the East Coast, for gas, particularly.”

“The largest premiums are found in generic jobs such as custodians, garage attendants, security officers, and the like. The average DWP security officer, for instance, makes 288 percent more than a non-DWP security officer working in the Los Angeles Metropolitan area. Overall, the weighted average wage premium for DWP employees performing generic jobs was 90 percent over their counterparts in the Los Angeles area. For all jobs, and including the value of benefits such as pensions and employer paid health insurance costs, the premium for DWP employees as estimated to be 155 percent higher – that is, 2.5 times as much – than for employees performing work with similar job descriptions in the Los Angeles area.

“Applying these premiums to the number of employees at the DWP, the total cost to rate-payers of the DWP paying above market wages is estimated to be $392.8 million a year.”

The result of the extra pay ends up being borne by ratepayers. As the Los Angeles Times reported:

“Meanwhile, residents of Los Angeles face yet another rate hike, only a couple of years after an 11.1 percent increase in electricity rates. DWP officials have recently suggested that they plan to seek recurring rate hikes of at least 2 percent per year beginning this year to fix infrastructure. But CityWatch is reporting that Angelenos should expect rate hikes of 5 percent to 8 percent a year, for each of the next five years. Residents in January paid 57 percent more for electricity than the national average, according to the BLS.”

Here’s the Table from the study showing the pay discrepancies.

“Brian D'Arcy, head of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power's largest employee union, is heading to court to try to fight a subpoena ordering him to explain how two nonprofits he co-manages have spent more than $40 million in ratepayer money since 2000.

“D'Arcy sent a letter to City Controller Ron Galperin and City Atty. Mike Feuer on Friday announcing his intention to ask a judge to stay enforcement of the subpoena, which was issued last week. D'Arcy's lawyer has asked for a court hearing Tuesday morning. …

“The Joint Training Institute and the Joint Safety Institute were created after a tense round of job cuts at the city-owned utility in the late 1990s, and have received up to $4 million per year from ratepayers since. There has not been a public accounting of how the money has been spent.”

What about other union 'institutes'?

That's from the Los Angeles Times. But this sort of scam, in which California taxpayers prop up sham labor programs, is more common than people understand. This is from a 2007 UC press release.

“The University of California, Berkeley's Institute of Industrial Relations and Center for Labor Research and Education along with their counterpart programs based at UCLA will become affiliated with an umbrella virtual organization named for prominent state labor leader Miguel Contreras.

“The UC Board of Regents' Subcommittee on Educational Policy today (Wednesday, Jan. 17) unanimously approved a proposal for the move. It was submitted by ex officio UC Regent and State Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez (D Los Angeles) in honor of Contreras, the former head of the 800,000 strong Los Angeles County Federation of Labor. Contreras died in 2005 at the age of 52.

“During the Regents' meeting at UCSF's Mission Bay complex, union supporters, rank and file workers and others including Contreras' widow and labor activist Maria Elena Durazo, spoke about the significant contributions of Contreras as well as of UC's labor studies. UC President Robert Dynes, an ex officio member of the Regents, also spoke in support of affiliating the UC Berkeley and UCLA labor efforts with the Miguel Contreras Labor Program.

“The full Board of Regents is set to act on the matter during a meeting tomorrow (Thursday, Jan. 18).

“Contreras began union organizing at the age of 17 with the United Farmworkers Union, and became one of the most influential Latino leaders in Los Angeles. He also was a strong proponent of education, particularly for the children of low income workers. Contreras mentored many aspiring political leaders, including Nunez. …”

“In recent years, UC labor research has focused on employment trends, union density, health care policy, and job quality in immigrant and African American communities. Education programs have included leadership development programs for union leaders, and for women and people of color.”

Honoring … this guy?

I'm just so, so confident this is all about academics and not make-work jobs and the creation of phony “research” justifying what unions want.

Now here's the punch line: the circumstances of the sainted Miguel Contreras' death. This is what I wrote in 2007:

“Ten months ago, the LA Weekly broke a huge scoop about a cover-up of the lurid details in the mysterious 2005 death of one of California's most powerful men, labor leader Miguel Contreras. The newspaper documented that the cover story promoted about Contreras' sudden death at age 52 — that he suffered a heart attack while driving — was a lie. Instead, he died while at a small 'alternative medicine' shop that was later raided for prostitution in an area considered 'the most heavily trafficked prostitution corridor' in Los Angeles.”

“This misdescription of the circumstances of the demise of the executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor was no accident. Instead, the LA Weekly offered evidence of what appeared to be a concerted effort by powerful L.A. officials to hide the truth by blocking an autopsy — which is legally required in 'sudden or unusual deaths.' Then-L.A. Councilman Martin Ludlow hunted for a doctor at Centinela Freeman hospital to sign a death certificate, only succeeding after being rebuffed by two physicians. These were far from the only irregularities.

“After this story broke, something bizarre happened. Instead of the usual media frenzy of trying to get to the bottom of this obvious scandal, initial follow-up stories focused on the furious reaction of one of L.A.'s most prominent liberal pundits, Harold Meyerson, to the LA Weekly report. He blasted the story as a betrayal by a liberal newspaper 'that some of us hoped would help remake Los Angeles into a more humane and equitable city.'

“And guess what? All the media heeded him — not just the LA Weekly.

“A Nexis search of the few weeks after the story broke shows no substantive follow-up of any kind beyond an L.A. Daily News editorial saying Contreras appeared to only be the latest prominent local to benefit from 'celebrity justice.'”

Hypocrisy: The L.A. Times is in the Hall of Fame

Never forget this story any time the L.A. Times starts trotting out the sanctimony about any issue under the sun. And this shameful history isn't the fault of the editorial pages. It's on the Times' allegedly neutral and fearless newsroom.

The idea that Miguel Contreras is treated as an official hero by the UC system couldn't be more telling. That the media have gone along with it also couldn't be more telling.

Budgeting, at least at the local and state level, where spending plans have to be balanced, is literally a zero-sum game. Yet it is inexplicably rare for a California journalist to note that political influence is driving compensation and regulatory decisions and to then link these decisions to this result: that there is less money available for the broader good or for the needy.

In Saturday’s Los Angeles Times, liberal pundit Steve Lopez offered strong proof that he had been mugged by reality and had figured out this dynamic. The topic: the city’s Department of Water and Power, which is every bit as out of control as the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California with its employee-first priorities.

Lopez notes that Angelenos’ water and power …

“… rates wouldn’t be going up as much if DWP employees joined the rest of the world and contributed, out of pocket, toward their healthcare premiums. The new deal does not require that for current or future employees. They’ll pay more toward their retiree healthcare costs, and 2% of the savings generated from a delay in pay hikes will go toward healthcare.

“But there will be no reduction in an employee’s paycheck.

“With healthcare costs rising, he said, and private sector employees bearing more of the burden, it was all the more reason to bring public employees on board. And what better time to extract such a concession than the year in which IBEW spent a fortune backing Wendy Greuel for mayor, only to see her crushed by Eric Garcetti.

“With other city employees set to negotiate new contracts soon, what incentive is there for them to pay for healthcare now that DWP employees have been spared? None.”

Now, after that display of common sense, Lopez has what amounts to an epiphany: linking compensation decisions driven by political clout to headaches for the general public caused by inadequate government funding.

” … you can look for the mayor and council members to go hat in hand to the public next November with a bond measure to pay for street repairs, if not sidewalk repairs. This despite Garcetti saying during his campaign that he didn’t think we needed a sales tax increase.

“But we need a $3 billion bond, or bigger?   

“The ‘back to basics’ mayor, as Garcetti calls himself, apparently has no other way to pay for streets and sidewalks without that bond measure.

“Will you be inclined to vote yes while your water and power rates are going up in a city that doesn’t require DWP employees to contribute to healthcare premiums? A city in  which 70% of all employees pay nothing for healthcare premiums?”

For good measure, Lopez also refers to another stress factor on DWP rate payers: the city’s “increasingly expensive mandate on securing renewable energy,” environmental trendiness that may thrill Westside enviros but that does nothing for most L.A. residents but reduce the money they have to spend on their families.

The travails of San Jose, Stockton and other troubled cities in California have kept the spotlight off Los Angeles. But it is headed into decades of budget pain because of its generosity to unions. As I noted in a post earlier this year, more than one-third of the city’s budget goes to pay for retirees’ pension and health care — and that percentage is going up, not down.

At least with the election of Garcetti as mayor, L.A. voters have chosen someone who grasps this is a problem. Greuel, the loon Garcetti defeated, wanted to add 2,000 police and 800 firefighters to the payroll — a 20 percent increase even though L.A.s crime and fire problems are near historic lows. Why? To win the support of the police and fire unions.

But Greuel’s defeat will only buy L.A. a little extra time in staving off its decline. It’s not just the city’s permanent budget nightmare. L.A.’s private-sector economy is also in the middle of a broad, long-term decline that only occasionally gets the attention of its large daily newspaper.

By Chris Reed

Last year, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power imposed an 11 percent rate hike — which it called a “rate change” — on its power customers, while water customers saw rates go up 5 percent.

Millions of Angelenos will no doubt be thrilled to know what this is paying for: $70,000 a year janitors. No wonder DWP unions want to keep pay data secret.

This is from the L.A. Times:

Average DWP pay: $101,237. It’s good to be DWPer

“Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge James Chalfant stared in disbelief Tuesday at a list of hundreds of Department of Water and Power employees who have asked that their names and salaries be withheld from the public, citing safety concerns.

“On the list were mechanics, typists and meter readers.

“‘This is frivolous on its face; I mean, these are DWP employees,’ Chalfant said, noting that the names of government employees are public and even undercover police officers have a hard time demonstrating they would be in danger if their names appeared on a list of department employees. …

“The average DWP employee, including everyone from the highest-paid engineers to the lowest-paid temps, made $101,237 in 2012, the data show.

“Among the job titles that saw the biggest average pay increases over the last five years were custodians, up 25%, from $56,060 to $69,995.

“Welders’ and machinists’ pay grew 18% on average to $132,548 and $142,562, respectively. Those figures represent full-time employees who worked entire years in 2008 and 2012.

“Employees seeking anonymity made $110,730 on average in 2012, 12.4% more than workers whose names were released.”

White House hearts federal employees

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the public employee gratification front, The Washington Post reports the Obama administration is seeking a raise in pay for all federal employees.

The raise may be small (1 percent), but the same “step” pay raise policies seen in California government are used in the federal government, so the claim that federal employees have gone years without pay hikes is simply wrong. And aren’t we supposed to see belt-tightening and shared sacrifice in this post-sequester era?

Instead of pragmatism, we get disinformation. “As the President stated in his [fiscal year] 2014 Budget, a permanent pay freeze is neither sustainable nor desirable,” a White House statement noted.

The myth of a ‘permanent pay freeze’

What “permanent pay freeze”? Hundreds of thousands of federal workers have gotten step raises in recent years.

And who says a pay freeze for government employees — with raises earned for performance, not for staying alive — “is neither sustainable nor desirable”? Turnover among federal employees is minuscule. That indicates compensation is far more than adequate.

Government employees aren’t just a protected class in California. It’s a federal phenomenon as well — a depressing one.