President's Message: PEPRA Solved the State's Pension Problems in 2013, Why Are The Investment/Insurance Agents and Greedy Wall Street Bankers Still Coming After Our Pensions? By Carlos Clayton

For those of us who can clearly remember back to 2013, we recall that the Public Employees Pension Reform Act (PEPRA) made drastic changes to every public employee retirement system.  CalPERS and every County operated pension system are forever required to manage their finances responsibly.

Of course, our own pension system, LACERA, has always operated responsibly and never had the problems associated with a few of the systems around California. Nevertheless, the State Legislature imposed its own solutions on LACERA and virtually every other public employee pension system.

Problem solved, right?  Apparently not. 

The fact that PEPRA set in state law that all public employees are now required to pay 100% of the employee's pension contribution; and that public agencies are no longer allowed to take pension "contribution holidays" when the systems are over-funded; and that the practice of "pension spiking" is now prohibited, matters not at all to the Investment/Insurance Agents and their Wall Street backers.

These Agents that can't stand a news cycle without their name and picture in the newspaper are back after our pensions again. This time they are proposing a State Constitutional Amendment for the 2016 ballot that would overturn those Constitutional protections that kept them from stealing from retirees the last time around.

The ballot measure proposal is ostensibly designed to replicate statewide the provisions of two local measures adopted in San Diego and in San Jose. In San Diego, the measure required all new hires to switch to 401(k) defined benefit pension systems. In San Jose, the measure gave current employees the choice of paying much greater contributions to keep their current retirement, or pay the same for a much lower defined benefit retirement. Both are deceptive encroachments on the public employee-employer agreement struck at the time of hire.  

If PEPRA fixed the public employee pension system problems, what's the motive of these unscrupulous agents to keep demanding more pension take-aways? Wall Street has the answer.   When more employees are forced into 401(k) retirement programs, the enormous funds now safely and profitably managed by LACERA and other pension associations will shift to Wall Street money managers. And as we all know, Wall Street money managers make profits whether the market goes up or down.

Public employees in Ventura County were unable to stop a 401(k) shift measure from qualifying for the ballot last year. Popular sentiment among voters was that more reform is still necessary, even though Ventura's retirement system is perfectly sustainable and perfectly affordable in its current state. Most say we face the same long odds in a statewide battle. I think we can educate California voters, one at a time.  

We can explain the reasons we have a secure pension -- because we do not have Social Security for the years we work for the County and we pay a fair portion of our salaries every month for an entire career. We can explain that public employees are not getting rich off our pay OR our pensions. We can and we must fight back.

CAPE will be organizing a program to push back against the greedy Wall Street money managers and insurance agents. I hope CAPE members will join us in defending our pensions and defending our retirement security.