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Time for pension reform in San Diego
Richard, here's one for you. A worker earning Social Security gets an additional 50% of their benefit for a non-working spouse. So in reality, they get 150% of what their entitled to for their time spent working and the amount they earned. I sure don't see you tilting windmills over that. Remove that benefit and SS might be saved. You're trying to add DROP money as a percentage of pay. That's like adding a 401K as percentage of pay. What you clearly don't understand it that it's the employees OWN MONEY. It's no different than if I maxed out my 401K with my own pay and had a million bucks sitting there. If I took $50K/year out of that, would you then add that to my retirement check and say I made 150% of salary? Of course not.— February 9, 2008 3:14 p.m.
Time for pension reform in San Diego
In response to post 42: Richard, SPSP certainly saves money, or rather saves the city from making payments. The retirement system is in the red because the city didn't pay into it. The city can't do that with SS. To allow that, the city had to negotiate with the employee unions and broker the switch from SS to SPSP. Once again, thank "San Diego's greatest mayor" Pete Wilson. I'm trying to think... who's advising Mayor Sanders now? Oh yeah, Pete Wilson. Post 43: The city hires outside negotiators now. I'm not sure about back then. If DROP return goes below 8% the taxpayers are indeed on the hook. How about we make it fair. To prevent that, let's just make the DROP return the same as the yearly return for SDCERS. Are you in for that? Oh wait... then SDCERS wouldn't make money, now would they? Have you figured out the return on the $125 million in DROP money that's in SDCERS now? At 2% (The 10 year average of 10% minus the 8% guarantee) that $125 million makes about $2.5 million a year if interest is compounded quarterly.— February 9, 2008 3:01 p.m.
2005 Audit Shows Internal Accounting Weaknesses; Despite Some Headway, Many More Improvements Must Be Made, Says Accounting Firm
There are also a lot of people in their 70's who are dead. Remember, by employing a person until 70, the city is assuming liability for any cancer, heart, lung, etc. problems until 5 years after retirement. There aren't 800 empty jobs anywhere in government. And again, the retirement is paid for... that's why firefighters pay 16% into their retirement instead of 6.2% into SS.— February 9, 2008 2:51 p.m.
Time for pension reform in San Diego
That's exactly the point Richard, SPSP was a negotiated trade off with the city. The city wanted to save money, so it gave the employees SPSP. Obviously, I'm not a lawyer, but I think that employees would have a pretty strong case to force the city to re-enter SS should a negotiated and vested retirement benefit be removed. You'll have to thank Pete Wilson (San Diego's best mayor, according to some) for that. The point you keep missing with DROP is that the 10 year average earnings of SDCERS is about 12% (working from memory here). DROP is the employee's own money. It's no different than putting that money in an outside annuity, except that SDCERS gets the profit from the difference between what it earns (12%) and what it pays (8%). How much is that a year? Remember -- that's how banks make their money. There is no "theft of taxpayer assets". They aren't taxpayer assets to begin with. The assets involved belong to the employee -- they are the employee's own retirement dollars.— February 9, 2008 10:06 a.m.
2005 Audit Shows Internal Accounting Weaknesses; Despite Some Headway, Many More Improvements Must Be Made, Says Accounting Firm
Don, The FD only has about 11 chief officers in desk jobs. There are about half that many captains. That's it. So where do you propose putting the other 800 people? There used to be a number of "light duty" positions funded to allow infirm folks to recover or retire, but those don't exist anymore. Should we create 800 new city jobs, with pay and benefits, just to accommodate older firefighters? Remember, the age 50 retirement is funded by an actuarially determined rate designed to allow retirement at 50.— February 8, 2008 5:38 p.m.
Government Employees Pull Far Ahead of Private Sector Employees in Pay, Fringes
The median income of the top 1/3 of SD firefighters is 116K, including OT. Benefits and retirement are .57 on top of salary, not including OT. (According to Carl DeMaio) That runs about $40K/year. In other words, the median income of ALL firefighters is nowhere near $200K, given that the median income of the TOP 1/3 of San Diego firefighters is about $150K. Search the VoSD for "topthousand" for the document that proves the median is $116K if you don't believe me.— February 6, 2008 6:38 a.m.
Government Employees Pull Far Ahead of Private Sector Employees in Pay, Fringes
Paul, Excellent commentary. You're absolutely correct in your observations. The multiplier for SDFD is 3% @ 50. It's basically the same for all of the agencies listed. The only reason that it is now 3% @ 50 (vs. the former 2.5% @50 to 2.9999% @ 55) is that the city lost a lawsuit (Corbett vs SDCERS) and settled. The alternative was to count OT towards retirement. The point of the study is not to cry poverty, but rather as a comparison to similar departments. Mayor Sanders keeps stating that he wants to use "the market" to set wages, so he commissioned this study to look at "the market". That's why I pointed out the usage of far away places rather than California cities. That's not a fair comparison. I believe that when you talk about folks at the "high end of the scale", you're talking about the statement in the report that most firefighters are top step Firefighter II's. That's really not all that hard to achieve. You need to be a firefighter for a year to achieve Firefighter II and then several more years to become top step. Beyond that, you're either frozen or promote. San Diego maintains fully staffed apparatus, so our Captain to employee ratio is higher than most other cities in the comparison.— February 5, 2008 6:54 a.m.
Government Employees Pull Far Ahead of Private Sector Employees in Pay, Fringes
Paul, That's before benefits. When you add in the cost of retirement and health care, you get the lower numbers since we pay so much more. Look at page 45 for the overall percentile rankings. And since you brought up stuff from further in the rankings - Pay raises for 2007 -- not included in this report since they were after the report came out: San Diego - 0% As in ZERO (Also 0% for 2005 and 2006) Carlsbad - 4.25% Encinitas - 5.1% (Also 5.1% for 2008 and 2009) Vista - 5% (Also 5% for 2008) Anaheim - 5% (Also 6% for 2008) Long Beach - 6% Murrieta - 6% Sacramento - 5% (Also 5% for 2008) LA County - 7% (Plus 3% for 2008) Get the point? So where do you suppose that leaves us now, a year later? Think the mayor will fund another study?— February 4, 2008 9:33 p.m.
Government Employees Pull Far Ahead of Private Sector Employees in Pay, Fringes
Don, a couple of comments: Those percentiles were calculated by the mayor's consultant. So I wouldn't figure that they'd favor the employee, would you? I think there's a darn good reason that the mayor included low paying cities not in this region, but left out higher paying cities that are in this region. I think if you compared SD to the ten largest cities in CA, we'd end up even closer to the bottom. Can you provide names of people who have worked 5 years, bought five years and then retired? Maybe positions? Or is that just hearsay?— February 4, 2008 2:51 p.m.
Government Employees Pull Far Ahead of Private Sector Employees in Pay, Fringes
Don, I might refer you to "The City of San Diego Fire Classification Compensation and Benefits Survey Results" at: http://www.sdfire.org/items/Survey_report_final_0… You'll see the following percentiles for top step SDFD employees with families. Firefighter II - 26% Engineer - 36% Captain - 36% Battalion Chief - 10% Odd that the mayor told the UT, "Firefighters are in the middle range of pay." More like the bottom third. Note that the mayor chose to include lower paid municipalities such as Houston and Phoenix, but ignored California cities such as San Jose, San Francisco and Oakland. Many of your comments include the phrase, "...is worth looking in to." So how about it? Why don't you do an analysis of the Corbett settlement, or firefighter cancer rates, or any of the other topics that you've said "is worth looking in to." How about doing an impartial study of SDFD pay and benefits and comparing it to the ten largest (largest population, not highest paid) cities in California?— February 4, 2008 2:04 p.m.