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CSPP

Marin County employees get 2% to 4% pension boost while the rest of Americans get nothing

The following is a comment on the recent Marin IJ article, "Marin pension system to award cost of living bumps of 2 percent to 4 percent," by Nels Johnson.


This equates to $10.4 MILLION PER MONTH at the expense of Marin taxpayers - most of whom are either receiving or will receive Social Security, which saw no increase for 2016. The myth of lower public employee salaries in exchange for more generous pensions has already been debunked, so we are left with this simple fact:

They do it because they can.

It's time to stop the bleeding before the patient is dead.

In a NPR report titled "No Cost Of Living Increase For Social Security Recipients In 2016", it states that:

For the third time this decade, millions of Americans will not see an annual cost-of-living increase next year, the Obama administration announced Thursday.

The news by the Social Security Administration confirms a move that was already widely expected. It cited a drop in consumer prices over the past year as the main factor for not triggering the automatic increase.

As NPR's Scott Horsley tells our Newscast unit, the Consumer Price Index — the formula the federal government uses to measure how prices of items we need change over time — remained flat.

I asked Dick Tait to provide a comment:

"For active employees, COLAs are negotiated and finalized in MOU's (Memorandums of Understanding). They can change each time a new MOU is adopted. It is my understanding that for County active employees, the MOU preceding the one that was adopted last summer did not have a COLA.

The COLA's for retirees are set forth in the various tiers that define retiree benefits. I don't think that they are vested per se, but they are written into the tiers via authorization by CERL (California Employee Retirement Law). CERL would have to be amended to change COLAs.

Note the provision that for retirees, COLAs are bankable. That is - if the COLA for a given year is say 4% and the tier limit is 3%, the 1% is banked and can be used for a subsequent year when the COLA is less than 3%. For example, assume a COLA is 2% one year. For that year the pensioner would still get 3% if there were banked COLAs."

I urge you to voice your outrage at the inequities of these increases, compared to the private sector, in letters to your supervisors, Jeff Wickman (MCERA), Matthew Hymel (County Administrator) and letters to the editor of the Marin IJ.

Please start using the phrase, "at the expense of taxpayers", whenever possible. Email addresses attached.

Regards,

Jody

CSPP

www.marincountypensions.com

Tags

Pension benefits