The year before Garcetti ascended from council president to mayor in 2013, the city adopted a new retirement tier for civilian employees hired after July 1, 2013 that lowered maximum pension benefits to 75 percent from 100 percent of final compensation. It also limits retiree health care to the employee, excluding dependents. Projected savings over a 30-year period are expected to be $4 billion, with the majority of savings in out years.

 

Strides made by the city include significant progress toward reducing fixed cost burdens for pension and other post-employment benefits such as retiree health care, according to a Moody’s Investors Service report in December.

 

The rating agency affirmed the city’s Aa2 general obligation bond rating in November and upgraded the city’s outstanding real property and lease-backed debt ratings to A1 and A2 from A2 and A3, respectively.

The 2015-16 spending plan estimates that pension and other retirement benefit costs will be $1.077 billion — just under 13 percent of the city’s total spending. That’s a vast increase over pension costs from 15 years ago. But the rise has stabilized, and Santana told reporters that the pension fund for city firefighters would be 92 percent funded by 2020 — a far better figure than in most California cities.

Unions counted on to make concessions

But there are reasons to wonder if the sunny speeches Garcetti has been giving about Los Angeles City Hall’s future are too optimistic. The first is that the city budget will balance in the fiscal year starting July 1 only if Garcetti and Santana win new concessions from public employee unions. The spending plan “assumes that about 20,000 city workers will agree to no raises and many will pay a bigger percentage of their health care costs, but talks with city employee unions have dragged on since their contracts expired last year,” the Daily News reported.

This will be tough to swallow for non public-safety unions, given that police won a four-year, 8.2 percent raise this spring, and given the United Teachers Los Angeles’ success in securing a 10 percent, two-year raise from the Los Angeles Unified School District in April.

The second, much bigger problem is downbeat expectations for the city’s private-sector economy. Garcetti and other city leaders are counting on the local economy to finally begin a strong recovery at a time when pessimism in elite circles has never been higher.

The Los Angeles 2020 Commission, consisting of powerful figures from in and out of government, issued a report in December 2013 that warned of chronic stagnation without sweeping changes:

As the result of two decades of slow job growth and stagnant wages, 28 percent of working Angelenos earn poverty pay. If you add those out of work, almost 40 percent of our community lives in what only can be called misery. The poverty rate in Los Angeles is higher than any other major American city. Median income in Los Angeles is lower than it was in 2007.

 

When it comes to job creation, Los Angeles has not kept pace with the nation or other cities. Our unemployment rate is among the highest for any major city. This is not just a consequence of the Great Recession. We have lagged behind in each of the three business cycles since 1990. Los Angeles is the only one of the seven major metropolitan areas in the country to show a net decline in non-farm job employment over the last decade.

 

Activity in most of our key economic sectors is flat or in decline. We have repeatedly ignored or fumbled opportunities in one of this era’s major growth industries, the intersection of science and engineering — a field where our university-based intellectual capital ought to make us a leader. With the closure of Boeing’s plant in ‡Long Beach, there is no longer a large-scale aircraft, space vehicle fabrication or assembly facility left in the area.

Only key policy change: Much higher minimum wage

Garcetti and other leaders welcomed the report and acknowledged the challenges facing the city’s private sector. But the most significant major policy change since the report’s issuance came just this week, when the City Council approved increasing the minimum wage within city borders to $15 an hour by 2020.

The sharp increase was opposed by business interests, who warned it would make the city’s business climate even worse.

It’s another sign of how daunting pension reform is in California. Ed Mendel of Calpensions.com has the details:

A retiree group won a big victory last month. Reversing a superior court ruling, an appeals court overturned part of a voter-approved San Francisco pension reform in 2011 that ended higher payments to retirees when investments have “excess earnings.” …

Retirees, scattered and no longer union members, might seem unlikely to be formidable, particularly when battling a cost-cutting pension reform backed by all 11 county supervisors, business and labor groups, and 69 percent of San Francisco voters in 2011.

The reform, Proposition C, was the milder establishment alternative to deeper pension cuts in Proposition D by Jeff Adachi, one of the 16 candidates for mayor on the San Francisco ballot that year, including the incumbent and winner, Mayor Ed Lee.

“The epitome of greed,” Gary Delagnes, president of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, told SF Weekly in 2012 when the retiree group began its legal challenge.

“Vested benefits” theory protects flawed concept

The court decision shows that judges take the concept of “vested benefits” very seriously. Unlike in the private sector, once a government union is promised benefits, those benefits can’t later be reduced. When this legal axiom is combined with the state Public Employment Relations Board’s hostility to ballot measures on pension issues, the difficulty that taxpayers face in trying to scale back government pensions looks extraordinary.

But the San Francisco case is particularly noteworthy because it involves the single category of pension benefit that actuaries, accountants and good-government advocates find most indefensible. Giving government pensioners extra money when pension funds have strong years only makes mathematical sense if the pensioners get less when pension funds have bad years. No local government in California has such a policy.

“Excess earnings” benefits are never seen at big pension agencies with strong staffs like CalSTRS or CalPERS; it’s understood that they’re just not sustainable in the long run.

But in cities like San Francisco, San Diego and Fresno, and counties like Alameda and Mendocino, the actuarial, common-sense arguments were overwhelmed by political clout and expedience.

Here’s a link to a study commissioned by the Schwarzenegger administration that outlined the many costly quirks in local governments’ pension policies. It was highly critical of “excess earnings” bonuses.

On one side are Democrats who favored the increases, including UC President Janet Napolitano, formerly President Obama’s secretary of the Department of Homeland Security; Regent Richard C. Blum, the husband of long-time U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.; and the school’s overwhelmingly Democratic faculty, who seek the tuition hikes to fill their pension plan that is $25 billion underfunded and would benefit from the extra money taken from students.

Napolitano insisted the UC system could not maintain its “vitality” or “stability” without more money from students.

In the 14-7 vote, among those seven opposed were some heavy-hitters in Democratic state politics: Gov. Jerry Brown, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, Assembly Speaker Toni Atkins and State Supt. of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson — all just re-elected to their offices; and former Speaker John Perez. Also in this camp would be many students who have protested the increases.

Brown went to the extraordinary length of offering his own counterproposal, falling back on the traditional idea of convening a panel of experts to recommend a policy.

Although the split among Democrats has dominated the news, tuition has not been the only issue to introduce party fractures in recent months.

State Democrats previously divided on education in the wake of the Vergara ruling, wherein Judge Rolf Treu ruled that California’s teacher tenure system unconstitutionally violated students’ civil rights. The controversy helped tee up a close and rancorous race between union-backed incumbent Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Torlakson and his challenger, Marshall Tuck. Both are Democrats.

But a broader range of issues also proved problematic. Environmentalists chafed, for instance, at Brown’s diversion of cap-and-trade fees into the costly high-speed rail project, which wouldn’t help reduce statewide emissions for years.

An open secret

The pensions crisis, however, has been quietly pushing Democrats apart. Outgoing controller and incoming Treasurer John Chiang, encouraged by Gov. Brown, developed a reputation for laying bare the abuses of pension funds like the California Public Employee’s Retirement System, whose pension-sweetening machinations recently drew the ire of the governor.

Chiang’s relatively bold stand has led some observers to speculate he could upset an anticipated struggle between Newsom and Attorney General Kamala Harris to replace Barbara Boxer in the U.S. Senate two years from now. For the moment, however, Chiang has helped drive a wedge into the Democratic Party by giving political cover to Democrats willing to object to California’s pension burdens. And though the pension issues at the heart of the UC tuition increase have been an open secret, they have yet to receive a commensurate amount of media attention.

As Bloomberg recently reported, the UC system operates an independent $90.7 billion pension fund, underfunded by about 20 percent. The state of California covers the employer’s percentage of pension costs for most state employees, but not for UC teachers.

Nathan Brostrom, UC’s chief financial officer, put the problem to Bloomberg in blunt terms. “Frankly, if the state were to pay that, we would not be proposing a tuition increase,” he said.

But Bloomberg pointed out, “Brown’s budget office says the pension system is independent and lawmakers have no input into how it is structured or the level of benefits provided. If the state were to pay more toward the university’s retirement costs,” Brown’s administration reasoned, “It would essentially be the same as giving them more funding.”

Given Sacramento’s current level of pension obligations — and the fraught politics surrounding the outcome of pension-fueled municipal bankruptcies in cities like Stockton — state Democrats have not been motivated to take on the UC’s massive pension obligations.

Student frustrations

Confusion and a sense of powerlessness among students have deepened the political impact of UC’s pensions.

At San Francisco’s UC campus in Mission Bay, where the regents gathered, “hundreds of students” staged angry protests, with some, as the San Francisco Chronicle reported, breaching “metal barricades and police security lines.”

Ry Rivard at Inside Higher Ed recounted the judgment of Student Regent Sadia Saifuddin, who told Regents she’d been obliged to take on four jobs to cover her schooling costs. Saying “students have always been taken hostage,” Saifuddin claimed “students have always had to pay the price of economic mismanagement by the regents and the state.”

The California Teachers Association has spent years depicting complaints about the costs of pensions as being driven not by, you know, math — but by the evil agenda of those doing the criticizing. The CTA routinely characterizes pension reformers as people who are somehow doing the 1 percenters’ bidding by torturing the middle class. If you are a politician or a public figure of any kind, unless your name is Jerry Brown, you don’t get to question pension red ink in the Golden State without being attacked personally.

So guess who else is worried about pension costs? The CTA’s parent group, the National Education Association. And it’s been worried for a long time about being overwhelmed by the ever-growing tab for its defined-benefits program — since at least 2007. The excellent @ReasonReform Twitter feed pointed me to this item by Mike Antonucci on the Intercepts blog, which monitors teacher unions:

“Almost exactly seven years ago, NEA found itself in a dispute with its retired employees because it was failing to fully fund its pension liabilities. The retirees received the support of the working staffers, and there were plans to picket the union’s Representative Assembly in Philadelphia that year.

“Faced with an embarrassing public relations situation, the union agreed to reach 100% funding of its obligations by 2021.

“After a recession, a weak recovery and unprecedented membership losses, NEA is in a bit of a bind fulfilling that promise. In 2010, it sought pension relief from Congress, bewailing how difficult it was to fund its defined benefit plans under current law. NEA government relations director Kim Anderson sent a letter to the House detailing the problems:

“‘And it is not just the plans that are jeopardized by this funding crisis:  many of NEA’s affiliated associations are being forced to postpone, curtail, or eliminate regular services, staffing, and capital improvements, often on top of increases in member dues. This is because, absent relief, the average NEA affiliate is facing the immediate obligation to make funding contributions equal to 37 percent of its payroll, just to maintain its defined benefit pension plan.'”

“With membership still falling and national dues levels stagnant, it seems NEA is trying to renegotiate that 2021 deadline.”

Join the club, NEA, join the club. As Antonucci writes …

“All of this was entirely predictable and, like state governments, NEA keeps hoping that some external force will make the impending catastrophe go away. So stalling is the preferred tactic.”

I’m going to try to get details on how the CTA’s internal pension plan is doing. Should be fun.