Nine Hundred Ex-S.F. Employees Earn $100K Pensions -- or Higher
Categories: Government
 |
Today's publication by the city's Civil Grand Jury is titled "Pension Tsunami: The Billion Dollar Bubble." Its title is the only part of it that is entertaining; the rest induces that "forgot to do my homework" feeling multiplied by the same numbers they use to calculate pensions here. While the term "pension reform" can tune out even the most ardent readers, know this: Some 900 onetime city employees are currently earning $100,000 a year or more -- way more -- in pensions until they draw their last breaths.
That includes nearly $266,000 for former chief of police Heather Fong and goes all the way down to unnamed "firefighters" (between $100,144 and $119,000) and Police Sergeant III ($100,001). You can review the complete "$100K Club" right here. How much money is this costing the city? To be exact, a metric shitload.
Disregarding prescient Civil Grand Jury reports is something of a city pastime (this is not the first such report plainly spelling out that our current pension system is untenable). But hiding under the covers won't make the problems go away. What problems? These problems:
- The city's pension and health care costs, currently a hulking $413 million, are projected to swell to $1 billion in five years' time;
- Next year alone, pension and health-care related costs will take a $63 million bite out of the city's general fund;
- Pensions handed out to police and firefighters are wildly disproportionate to those earned by everyone else.
- In 2002, the city passed Proposition H -- which mandated that public safety employees make up the difference if the city ever had to dip into its reserves to fund the pension system. That has been the case since at least 2004 -- but the jury found no proof that the city has asked the police and firefighters to pay up -- thus costing the general fund hundreds of millions of dollars.
Public safety workers -- who, keep in mind, can earn full pensions at age 55 -- earn up to 90 percent of their highest salaries in pension pay. That ceiling is 75 percent for everyone else. So, while police and firefighters make up only 18 percent of retirees earning pensions, they make up 72 percent of all the employees earning $75,000 or more in pension pay, and 82 percent of the "$100K club."
The Grand Jury's report, by the way, indicates that "pension spiking" -- hiking up an employee's salary in his or her last year to greatly increase pension pay -- still appears to be the M.O. in the fire department. Between mid-2007 and April of this year, 107 firefighters retired. Of those, 71 received a raise of 10 percent or more in their last year before retirement.
In conclusion, the jury offers solutions undertaken in realms where fiscal sanity is a tenable concept -- i.e. elsewhere. And it concludes by stressing that this is a problem that "cannot wait."
Just like it did last year.
Follow us on Twitter at @TheSnitchSF and @SFWeekly
Write Comment
Email to Friend
Print Article
