A

At issue was Proposition B, approved by San Diego voters in 2012 by a nearly 2-to-1 margin. The measure required that all city employees who began their jobs on or after Jan. 1, 2013 – except for police officers – get 401(k)-style retirement benefits instead of the defined benefit pensions that left San Diego finances in near ruins more than a decade ago because of City Council decisions to underfund them.

But San Diego employee unions and the California Public Employees Relations Board (PERB) argued even before the measure reached the ballot that it violated state collective bargaining laws because the campaign for the pension changes was led in 2011 and 2012 by then-San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders. He claimed that his role in the Prop. B campaign was as a private citizen – not as mayor – and thus he faced no obligation to collectively bargain with public employee unions before touting the direct-democracy initiative.

Before reaching the state high court, a trial judge first disagreed with Sanders and San Diego, then an appellate court sided with the city. But all seven state justices joined in a ruling that found that city leaders had not met their requirement to first seek changes at the bargaining table before seeking to impose them through direct democracy.

“Allowing public officials to purposefully evade the meet-and-confer requirements of [state collective bargaining rules] by officially sponsoring a citizens’ initiative would seriously undermine the policies served by the statute: fostering full communication between public employers and employees, as well as improving personnel management and employer-employee relations,” the court held. It ordered the case be sent back to the appellate court to determine how San Diego should untangle its mess.

Elected leaders may be less likely to lead ballot fights

The decision seems likely to change the nature of direct democracy going forward – at least at the local level of California government.

Direct democracy, brought forward in California by Gov. Hiram Johnson in 1911, has greatly benefited from the active participation of elected officials. They are often more able to win public approval of sweeping reforms through the ballot box than they can through the Legislature or city or county governing boards, which are often allied with deep-pockets special interests.

For example, Earl Warren – the former U.S. Supreme Court chief justice and California governor – repeatedly led ballot campaigns as Alameda County district attorney that directly affected many areas of California life.

But similar efforts by a politician in 2018 would face a different kind of vetting than Warren faced. Going forward, any ballot proposal that affects public employees in any way is subject to a potential court veto if it can be established that it were led by elected officials who didn’t live up to their collective bargaining obligations.

The California PERB Blog’s analysis noted that justices “did leave open the possibility that government officials can separate their official actions from their private activities. However, the court did not provide any guidance on what a government official would have to do to make such a distinction clear.”

Last week, a three-judge panel of the fourth state appellate court district unanimously rejected a 2015 PERB ruling that if upheld would have invalidated a successful 2012 San Diego ballot measure that gave newly hired city employees – except for police officers – 401(k)-style retirement benefits instead of defined-benefit pensions. The measure was meant to dig California’s second-biggest city out of a hole created by two City Council decisions to intentionally underfund the San Diego pension system, leading to a city fiscal crisis so severe that San Diego was dubbed “Enron-by-the-Sea” in 2004 by the New York Times.

PERB’s ruling was based on the view that any pension ballot measure that was promoted by elected city officials – in San Diego’s case, by then-Mayor Jerry Sanders and several City Council members – ran afoul of state requirements that local governments had to negotiate in the standard collective bargaining “meet and confer” process before they could change terms of employment.

This legal argument was tough to square with California’s history. Elected officials frequently have taken the lead in employing direct democracy to adopt new laws or modify existing ones – including those that affect terms of employment for public employees. In 2005, for example, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sought to change teacher tenure rules in a special election. Schwarzenegger couldn’t sell the change to voters, but his attempt to do so was not seen as unlawful or unusual.

The appellate panel agreed with the city of San Diego’s argument that while elected officials helped lobby for the 2012 pension reform measure, it was crafted and placed on the ballot in keeping with standard practices for citizens’ initiatives, with petition committees, signature-gathering campaigns and other normal trappings of direct democracy. The ruling also noted that PERB had tried to use its official powers to block the ballot measure in early 2012 even before it reached the ballot, with the hint that appellate judges saw this decision as a sign of PERB abusing its authority.

PERB wanted collective bargaining to apply retroactively to older laws

PERB’s previous setback in asserting the sweeping powers of collective bargaining laws came in its response to a lawsuit filed in 2011. Parent activists sued the Los Angeles Unified School District for not considering student performance when formally evaluating teachers, as is required by the Stull Act, a far-reaching state education blueprint enacted in 1971.

PERB contended that before teachers were subject to such evaluations, the matter should be collectively bargained – even though the primary law establishing collective bargaining for teachers was approved in 1975, four years after the Stull Act took effect. The agency also held that it should have initial jurisdiction over the case – not state courts.

But Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James C. Chalfant’s 2012 decision categorically rejected PERB’s arguments, saying that LAUSD could not ignore the Stull Act’s requirements, that collective bargaining did not apply retroactively to older state laws and that parent activists were free to use the courts to challenge whether public schools were complying with state laws.

The Stull Act remains an area of contention for California public schools despite Chalfant’s ruling. In September, Contra County Superior Court Judge Barry P. Good rejected a lawsuit that said 13 Northern California school districts were breaking state law by refusing to consider student performance in evaluating teachers.

Good’s 40-page ruling held that the Stull Act’s requirements were not as “clear and unambiguous” as those who filed the lawsuit contended.

More than 90 percent of the 23,000 workers at 23 CSU campuses represented by the California Faculty Association campuses have voted in favor of striking unless they receive three years of annual pay raises of 5 percent, not the 2 percent annual raises offered by the state. A rally last week in Long Beach called by the CFA was attended by more than 1,000 people, Reuters reported. The wire service’s story illustrated a seemingly united CSU faculty:

“People are suffering and hurting financially,” said Theresa Montaño, a vice president of the California Teachers Association. “Faculty members can’t pay off their debt, raise a family or buy a home.”

 

During the march, many protesters said that if faculty members don’t get the salary increase, they are ready to walk off the job. …

 

Jennifer Eagan, a president for CFA, said it’s “unfair to ask professors keep sacrificing year after year without a significant pay increase.”

Faculty seek help from union-friendly state agency

The CFA further escalated its fight with the state government on Thursday by filing an unfair labor practices allegation with the state Public Employment Relations Board. This description is from the CFA’s website:

The charge is based on language in HEERA [the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act] which requires that the CSU and CFA reach an agreement on salary before the university sends a budget request to the Legislature and governor.

 

In fact, in both 2015-16 and 2016-17 the CSU made Support Budget requests that included their plan to implement a 2 percent faculty salary increase for each year. By making a budget request prior to reaching agreement with CFA on what would be needed to offer an adequate salary pool and by arguing that they have “allocated $65.5 million for a 2 percent compensation pool for all employees,” and limiting discussion of salary to that predetermined pool, the CSU has “violated its duty to meet and confer with CFA in good faith.”

 

In his remarks to the Board of Trustees on Wednesday November 18 Kevin Wehr highlighted the problem. “What you fail to understand is that deciding what you think is fair compensation for your employees before the bargaining process even begins is not bargaining in good faith,” Wehr said. “Indeed Section 3572b HEERA of recognizes that fact and says that once we reach an agreement ‘an appropriate request for financing or budgetary funding for all state-funded employees … shall be forwarded … to the Legislature and the Governor.’ You have put the cart before the horse.”

PERB has consistently ruled in favor of local government unions challenging “bad faith” decisions by governments on changes in compensation. This time, however, the ultimate target isn’t the cities of San Jose or San Diego or the Los Angeles Unified School District — it’s Gov. Jerry Brown, who cleaned house at PERB in 2011 and removed leaders chosen by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who had fought with the California Nurses Association for years.

This is the same governor who billed his 2012 pension reform legislation as a game changer. Baloney.

Supporting an approach that the Sac Bee editorial page likens to sanctioning “spiking by another name” is a farce. So is endorsing CalPERS’ theory that anti-spiking provisions of the state legislation have to be collectively bargained at the individual agency level, as board member J.J. Jelincic said Tuesday.

But Brown’s heart has never been in the reform effort, despite all his rhetorical flourishes and his credit-taking.

Two more examples of fake reform

The fake quality of Brown’s reform spirit has shown itself repeatedly.

The state Public Employment Relations Board, controlled by Brown appointees, has tried to sandbag local pension reforms approved in landslides by voters in San Jose and San Diego.

But worst of all is how — when it came to teachers — the governor didn’t just turn his back on his 2012 promise to have public employees share equally with taxpayers the cost of their pensions; instead, Jerry Brown OK’d a CalSTRS funding change that socked taxpayers even harder while insulating teachers from the pain of the fix. Under Brown’s plan …

… eventually there will $5 billion more a year in state spending to cover CalSTRS’ unfunded liabilities. 70 percent of that will come from districts (and thus indirectly from the state); 20 percent will come directly from the state; and 10 percent will come from teachers.

So much for a 50-50 split of pension funding costs. That’s from Cal Watchdog.

A genius at PR, not governance

When the history of Jerry Brown’s return to the governor’s office is written, the establishment probably will promote the narrative that he was a genius. I think that narrative is built almost entirely on the fact that Prop. 25 makes it easier to pass state budgets and that Silicon Valley — without Brown’s help — is such an amazing economic engine.

The California that I see has the nation’s highest-poverty rate; is on track to have the nation’s biggest public works boondoggle; and operates a public school system more interested in helping adult employees than students.

If this is a success story, the definition of success is … evolving.

Here’s the lead of the story:

“A vandal smashed the window of San Luis Obispo Mayor Jan Marx’s Prius Monday while she attended a luncheon Rotary Club meeting at the Madonna Inn.

“It was the only vehicle damaged in the busy parking lot.

“Although the mayor was quick to say she has no idea who was behind the vandalism, it occurred shortly after the City Council decided to appeal a recent ruling that could require the city to restore binding arbitration to the city’s charter.”

PERB thwarted San Luis Obispo voters; council chose to appeal

Requiring binding arbitration to resolve differences between elected officials and public employee unions often leads to split-the-difference resolutions of pay disputes. It can make it close to impossible for city leaders to, yunno, lead — binding them to a future in which their employees’ pay always goes up, up and away.

San Luis Obispo residents understood this; in 2006, for example, the police officers’ union rejected a 20 percent, four-year raise, knowing it could get more after arbitration. That is why residents voted overwhelmingly to strip the binding arbitration requirement from city law in 2011.  But a PERB administrative judge recently ruled that the public vote must be thrown out because the city charter can’t be changed to ban binding arbitration — without binding arbitration!

Sheesh. Shades of PERB rulings that existing state laws should be subject to collective bargaining.

As former San Luis Obispo Councilman Andrew Carter explains here, this ridiculous PERB ruling is what the City Council voted to appeal.

LOL: No evidence, only one group of suspects

Back to the SLO Tribune story and its coverage of the vandalizing of the PERB-doubting mayor’s car. The piece can only be read as building off a 100 percent assumption a cop or firefighter was to blame:

“The presidents of the city’s firefighters and police unions issued a joint written statement Tuesday expressing dismay over the vandalism to Marx’s car.

“‘We have nothing but the highest respect for our elected officials and the process they are working through. The decision to appeal the recent PERB decision was not a surprise to us,’ they wrote. ‘We understand why the City is appealing the decision, and we respect the process of the appeal. We are upset that it appears someone may have intentionally broke the Mayor’s car window, and we hope that the person responsible is brought to justice.'”

Yeah, sure you do. Then you’d have one less person paying dues.

The CTA blocking efforts to make it easier to remove classroom sexual predators and instead passing legislation that gave such predators new protections is one example. Another is the state Public Employment Relations Board making insane arguments, such as asserting the provisions of a 1971 state law mandating teacher performance be part of job evaluations should be subject to collective bargaining now — and in every school district! Another is the Legislature passing a bill that would have led to even more shakedown lawsuits in response to corrupt trial lawyer scams targeting minority small businesses.

This ruthless extremism is on particular display with direct democracy. The Attorney General’s Office under Bill Lockyer, Jerry Brown and now Kamala Harris has a horrible record of crafting ballot language for initiatives and constitutional amendments — language obviously meant to push voters one way or the other when it comes to signing petitions or voting, whether it be for union power plays or on social issues like gay marriage.

So guess what happened Tuesday? The Secretary of State’s Office released the official title and summary for a proposed anti-bullet train ballot measure prepared by the AG’s office, and it seems downright reasonable and fair:

“HIGH-SPEED RAIL. FUTURE BOND SALES. NEW TRANSPORTATION TECHNOLOGIES. INITIATIVE STATUTE. Prevents sale of high-speed rail bonds previously approved by voters for construction of a high-speed rail system, except to fund any segment already under construction. Permits construction of first segment of the high-speed rail system to proceed, if Legislature consents, to allow comparison with other transportation technologies that deliver speeds exceeding 250 miles per hour or energy efficiencies exceeding 120 miles per gallon or equivalent. Authorizes state to acquire/dedicate right-of-way and contract with private developers to construct and operate new transportation technology pilot projects for comparison with high-speed rail. Summary of estimate by Legislative Analyst and Director of Finance of fiscal impact on state and local government: Impact to state debt-service savings ranging from zero to about $650 million annually from not using state bond funds to construct high-speed rail, depending on how this measure is interpreted and the resulting reduction in bond funds spent. Potential state costs in the hundreds of millions of dollars to the extent that the state is not reimbursed by private developers for right-of-way acquisition for the development of transportation pilot projects. Potential reduction in state and local tax revenues of tens of millions of dollars annually for a few years, resulting from a loss of federal matching funds.”

Dems ready to bail on bullet train without admitting as much

So what’s going on here? Why is Kamala Harris playing fair?

I think it’s more evidence for my theory that Dem leaders from Gov. Jerry Brown down privately agree with Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and want the bullet train gone before it becomes Big Dig West — but they want to do so without blood on their hands or without admitting they championed a fiasco. Instead, they can lamely blame “declinists” and mean people who opposed the bullet train from the start.

How are they going to pull this off? Through intentionally inept lawyering. As I wrote last fall for this site:

“In California Attorney General Kamala Harris … office’s ‘remedies’ brief in October responding to Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael Kenny’s Aug. 16 ruling that the bullet train had an illegal business plan and inadequate environmental reviews, there was no challenge to Kenny’s findings. There was just the assertion that work on the project could continue using federal funds. …

“It seems awfully problematic for the state to concede its plans break the law yet still want to proceed with a $68 billion project. But that appears to be what has happened.”

Touting ludicrous legal theories with knowledge they’re ludicrous

Here’s more from CWD in January on the the second round of legal responses from the state to anti-rail authority rulings:

“For five months after Judge Kenny’s ruling, the Brown administration didn’t question its legal reasoning one bit. Now the administration accuses the judge of ‘erecting obstacles found nowhere in the voter-approved bond act’ of 2008 that provided $9.95 billion in bond seed money for the project. Huh? How can the governor and attorney general make this argument now when they didn’t before?

“Maybe because they know how ludicrous it will look to sober observers, and they like that it looks ludicrous.

“Look at the bigger picture. Two plus two equals four, people.

“By asking the California Supreme Court to weigh in quickly, and by using an obviously flawed legal argument in doing so, Jerry is angling for a prompt resolution to the bullet-train saga — before more money is spent and before eminent domain is used to seize perfectly sound homes, farms and businesses in the Central Valley.”

Now there’s more evidence for this thesis. If Kamala Harris really wanted the bullet train, her MO would have been to write another slanted ballot summary and title.

She didn’t.

Sherlock Holmes would know what to think of this. It’s the dog that didn’t bark.

By Chris Reed

California’s dual, incompatible narratives keep rolling along.

On the one hand, we’re supposed to believe the passage of Proposition 30 and Gov. Jerry Brown’s able stewardship have lifted the Golden State out of the doldrums.

On the other hand, there are the actual hard facts.

California’s longest sustained stretch of high unemployment since the Depression continues. We’ve been over than 8 percent for four years in a row. The most recent figures have California at 9.4 percent, among the nation’s worst.

And the state’s finances that Jerry supposedly repaired remain a vast, intractable mess, as two headlines this morning remind us.

Oh, yeah, that budget crisis is no more

First there was this from the L.A. Times:

“SACRAMENTO — Arnold Schwarzenegger persuaded voters nine years ago that if they let him borrow money to cover the budget deficit, California’s financial woes would end for good. A key part of his plan was a new rainy-day fund to insulate the state from further crisis.

“‘It will be a whole new ball game,’ Schwarzenegger said. ‘Trust me.’

“But California was roiled by financial turmoil for years afterward, and today the reserve is empty. With more than $5 billion in bonds left to repay, Gov. Jerry Brown apparently plans to leave it that way.

“The reserve was created without a firm requirement to fill it, and Brown’s proposed budget contains no allocation for the fund. Without a financial cushion, some experts say, California is more vulnerable than many other states to drops in revenue that can lead to social-services cuts or pink slips for teachers.”

Oh, yeah, that state pension fix ended the benefits crisis

Then there was this reminder from Ed Mendel that the state government has a retirement benefits crisis, not just a pension problem, and on a key front the state can’t do anything about it because unions won’t let them — meaning the problem will keep getting worse and worse:

“With pensions presumably shored up by Gov. Brown’s reform and a CalPERS rate hike, will the problem-solving trend spread to what is, by some measures, an even bigger retirement debt: health care promised state workers?

“It was no surprise last week when a Democratic-controlled Senate committee rejected a Republican’s proposal to begin setting aside money to pay for retiree health care promised new state workers, putting a small dent in a $64 billion 30-year debt.

“Labor lobbyists told the committee they do not oppose ‘prefunding’ retiree health care that is now ‘pay as you go.’ This year $1.8 billion is budgeted for annual costs with no money added to invest and yield earnings to reduce long-term costs.

“The labor unions said the funding of retiree health care is a pay issue, possibly affecting the total amount available for salaries, and therefore should be addressed through collective bargaining.”

You follow? The unions won’t let the state act responsibly in dealing with a huge long-term problem involving benefits going to union workers, because anything involving money affects salaries, which must be collectively bargained. This is consistent with the insane view of Jerry Brown’s appointees to the Public Employment Relations Board, which has argued that collective bargaining requirements mean that Los Angeles Unified can’t enforce a 1971 state law mandating that student performance be part of teacher evaluations. Collective bargaining: It’s California’s new Constitution!

Governor’s greatest triumph: Selling a fake narrative

Jerry Brown hasn’t fixed anything. He’s been better than Arnold at getting Dems in the Legislature to acknowledge reality, which is a triumph. But the state government remains a poorly run mess. And the fundamental arc of the California economy remains rotten for poor people and much of the middle class.

The governor’s greatest triumph? It’s somehow persuading much of the media that this factually driven narrative of incompetence and despair is no longer true.

By Chris Reed

In 2006, San Diego voters gave a landslide win to a ballot measure that would force groups of city workers to compete against private firms for the right to provide city services in a process known as “managed competition.”

For four years, union supporters on the City Council stymied the adoption of the innovative reform. One of those supporting this undemocratic delay game, Councilman David Alvarez, told me flat-out that he didn’t care what the voters wanted when he was a first-time candidate in spring 2010.

Finally, later that year, when a moderate Democrat, Tony Young, took over as council president, managed comp was implemented. And just as expected, it produced millions in savings in a series of bid processes in which city workers — who knew how much waste there was and how to root it out — won every one of the competitions.

Filner: First lies, now obstruction

Now, however, Republican Mayor Jerry Sanders is gone. His replacement, Democrat Bob Filner, has made clear he doesn’t care what the voters want. First, the former congressman was caught fragrantly lying about what managed comp had wrought in San Diego.

“To illustrate the pitfalls of managed competition, San Diego Mayor Bob Filner has repeatedly cited the devastating effects the competitive bidding process has had on fleet services, the city division in charge of maintaining 4,000 vehicles including fire engines, garbage trucks and patrol cars.

“On at least three occasions, Filner has described a Nov. 27 visit he made to see the mechanics in fleet services. Each time he said the division had its workforce slashed through managed competition and that long lines of broken-down vehicles have resulted, forcing employees to arrive to work early to do the repairs on their own time. He’s touted it as an example of how ‘we have cut the level of service so drastically as to cause us problems.’

“The basic premise of his story — that cuts made through managed competition have decimated fleet services — is untrue. The city has yet to implement the proposed changes, according to internal memos and public testimony from two members of the mayor’s staff.”

Now he’s taking steps to kill it with the old tactic of bureaucratic delay — which he pretends is actually a period to examine the process and make it better.

San Diego’s other dramatic reform of recent years — the June 2012 vote by city residents to end defined-benefit pensions for most new city workers — is under assault by an obscure state agency, as CalWatchdog has been detailing. In an interview Wednesday, City Attorney Jan Goldsmith told me that he doesn’t think Filner can impede that reform, since it’s now part of the City Charter, the equivalent of San Diego’s constitution.

A true believer, not just a stooge

But don’t underestimate Filner’s readiness to go the extra mile for organized labor. With some elected Democrats — such as as San Diego state lawmakers Ben Hueso, Toni Atkins and Marty Block — their devotion to unions seems transactional. They’re doing what they have to do to get elected and re-elected.

However, Filner, a child of the 1960s, appears to truly believe that whatever unions want is automatically the equivalent of social justice. And if that means undercutting the will of the voters of the city he leads, he won’t hesitate.

Hip-hip hooray.

By Chris Reed

Jerry Brown’s nonstop self-accolades for his alleged genius in bringing California back to solid ground are rather dubious. But it is with pensions that Brown’s self-congratulation is most incoherent. While he congratulates himself for achieving moderate pension reform via the Legislature last summer, his appointees continue their anti-reform rampage on the state Public Employment Relations Board.

On Tuesday night, the latest PERB outrage arrived with the release of a ruling from a PERB administrative law judge which gives labor unions a leg up in their push to invalidate Proposition B, the unprecedentedly ambitious pension reform measure approved by San Diego voters in a landslide last June. The judge held that state courts should find the measure illegal because city officials should have engaged in collective bargaining with city labor unions before pursuing a ballot initiative, a ruling in keeping with PERB’s emerging view that collective bargaining trumps state law.

Brown appointees go where no bureaucrats have gone before

As I detailed for CalWatchDog.com in September, the radicalization of PERB came as an unexpected consequence of the California Nurses Association’s war with Brown’s predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. The CNA was furious with PERB for preventing illegal strikes at UC hospitals as a tactic to win raises, and the union got Brown to install former CNA counsel M. Suzanne Murphy as PERB’s general counsel, and to appoint union-beholden members to the agency’s governing board.

The result of this turnover has been much more than the CNA getting its way on a new contract. Instead, it’s resulted in a widening of the war on direct democracy from the California Attorney General’s Office, whose Democratic occupants always write dishonest ballot language to undercut initiatives that unions don’t like; and from a previously obscure government bureaucracy:

“In February 2012, PERB’s radical change in course first became apparent when the agency for the first time in California history sought to keep a pending San Diego pension reform ballot measure from going before voters in June. Murphy’s argument held that, because elected officials in San Diego were involved in drafting the measure, it amounted to an attempt to circumvent and thus violate union collective bargaining rights — even though the San Diego City Council had taken a stand against the measure and it had been organized by private groups.

“This argument, if upheld, arguably would set a precedent under which elected officials could never join in ballot petition campaigns to try to force changes in government policies, because such changes would have affected employees, and thus needed to be collectively bargained.”

Dan Borenstein’s recent column underscores another example of Brown’s incoherence on pensions. In his bizarre effort to declare California’s structural deficit as having vanished, the governor simply ignores the vast underfunding of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System. By doing so, he makes the problem more intractable, as Borenstein detailed in his Bay Area News Group op-ed:

“Gov. Jerry Brown’s claim that he balanced his proposed 2013-14 budget ignores that he’s driving the state teacher pension system deeper into debt by shortchanging it at least $4.5 billion.

“Teachers will almost certainly receive retirement payments they have earned. It’s our children, the next generation of taxpayers, who will suffer. They will be stuck with an astronomical bill we should be paying now.”

But at least Brown doesn’t have to stop patting himself on the back if he ignores CalSTRS’ woes.

San Diego city attorney: Real judges will do right thing

As for PERB, San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith predicted in an email Tuesday night that the administrative law judge’s ruling would be seen as a rogue act and wouldn’t hold up in court — a real court, not the PERB kangaroo court.

“We expected it. Barely mentioned are the 120,000 voters who signed petitions to get Prop B on the ballot and had a constitutional right to have it placed on the ballot or the voters who approved it last June,” Goldsmith wrote. “We look forward to returning to the courts where the constitution and the rule of law applies. Recall that PERB filed a lawsuit to stop the city from placing Prop B on the ballot and proceeded to lose three attempts to get an injunction in court; then, PERB dismissed its lawsuit.”

Goldsmith did a good job in an op-ed last summer of exposing the absurdity of the PERB stance:

“Citizen initiatives have been around for over 100 years. Yet never before has any initiative that qualified for the ballot through petition signatures been deemed a ‘sham’ citizen initiative. Governors (including Jerry Brown on his current tax initiative), mayors and other political leaders have regularly supported citizen initiatives and never has that support rendered those citizen initiatives ‘shams.’

“Since 1911, the right to place citizen initiatives on the ballot through voter petitions has been a constitutional right in California reserved by the people to bypass politicians and special interests. This right is not conditioned upon the approval of those special interests and is not something to be bargained over.”

The issue the San Diego city attorney identifies is even bigger than pension reform. It’s likely that the Yale Law School graduate who governs this state understands this.

But Jerry Brown would rather pretend he’s figured out how to make California thrive than acknowledge the undemocratic ways his appointees are behaving at the state Public Employment Relations Board.

By Chris Reed

San Diegans had an extremely unusual choice for mayor Tuesday, picking between a gay libertarian who’d already turned the city into a hotbed of government experimentation and a 20-year congressman who is a ’60s-ethos liberal with serious anger-management issues. The contrast between City Councilman Carl DeMaio and Rep. Bob Filner was so unusual that it even got prominent play in The New York Times.

Fueled by hundreds of thousands of dollars in union-paid attack ads and a hypocritical strategy that sought to remind voters DeMaio was gay, Filner pulled off a 51.5 percent to 48.5 percent win.

With less than four weeks until he takes office, the question for Filner is whether he will try to fight implementation of aggressive reforms approved by San Diego’s voters or whether he will betray voters by working with unions and the union-controlled state Public Employment Relations Board in trying to sandbag those reforms.

The first of those reforms is Proposition C, approved in a landslide by San Diego voters in 2006. It was intended to cut the cost of providing city services through a “managed competition” process in which private companies bid against groups of city employees for city contracts.

After four years of stalling by public employee unions in negotiations with the city as well as stall tactics by a City Council whose Democratic majority had strong union ties, “managed competition” was finally implemented.  The four “competitions” to date have all been won by city employees, to the surprise of some. But the savings have been substantial, and are expected to reach tens of millions of dollars annually in coming years.

Under Mayor Jerry Sanders, the city has been moving steadily toward the biggest “managed comp” implementation of all, in trash collection.

Defined-benefit pensions no more?

The second reform is Proposition B, approved this June by San Diego voters in another landslide.

It seeks to impose a six-year freeze on “pensionable pay” — the types of compensation that are added up to calculate pensions. It will end defined-benefit pensions for new city employees, except for police, and give them a 401(k)-style defined-investment retirement benefit.

This is the measure that PERB, in an extraordinary move, tried to kill before it even reached the ballot. The agency makes the bizarre argument that, because DeMaio, Sanders and other city leaders led the push for the ballot petitions for Measure B, it amounted to an illegal attempt to circumvent mandatory collective bargaining on job conditions. (San Diego City Attorney Jan Goldsmith, who is fighting PERB, so far successfully, captures the absurdity of the PERB stand well here.)

Filner has said he will honor voters’ wishes on these measures. But he has long criticized both, and it would be easy to see him saying he had changed his mind.

So is the DeMaio-driven libertarian dream of increasingly privatized city services and private sector-level government compensation still alive in San Diego?

To a considerable degree, it appears to be up to Filner. If he follows through with managed competition on trash — which has potential savings of hundreds of millions of dollars in coming years — Filner may learn to appreciate the process. The extra money could pave a lot of roads in a city where even busy boulevards in rich areas like Camino del Norte in Rancho Bernardo are pothole-strewn.

The stark choice for a true-left pol

But to the extent that the left sees privatization as a bogeyman akin to outsourcing, it’s hard to imagine Filner accepting a trash-service bidding process that led to hundreds of city workers getting axed. Sooner or later, an outside bidder is going to win, and trash is likely to draw several serious bids. That would leave Filner with a stark choice.

There is a transactional quality to the enthusiasm that many of California’s elected Democrats show for public employee unions. They know where their bread is buttered. But Filner’s passions, for better and worse, seem real. He sees the world in binary fashion, with little gray. For him to decide to accept, rather than fight, a mass firing of public employees is difficult to imagine. The same may hold for accepting a profound change in public-employee retirement benefits as well.

So much for heeding the voters in America’s eighth-largest city. Libertarians may be left to wonder what might have been. DeMaio would be the next mayor if only one in 66 San Diego voters preferred him to Filner.

One in 66.