The following was sent to our membership tonight, and states our position on the current contract negotiations with the County miscellaneous employees. Links are provided for sources of some of the information included therein.
I received information on the salary increases for County employees over the last five years, for both miscellaneous employees and the Sheriff’s dept. The employees are divided up into these two main categories, so that any non safety employees are called miscellaneous. This includes the Probation department which is pushing for the enhanced pension and retiree health benefits.
In short, in the five year period from 2002 to 2006 miscellaneous employees received a 17.5% increase in COLA, or cost of living adjustments, ie pay increases.Law Enforcement received 25.2%. Now they also received what they call step increases each year, and equity adjustments. All receive the equity adjustments, not all receive step increases if they are at the top of their scale already or if they receive a bad performance review. It is my belief that most of the employees get both those every year, although I do not yet have the exact numbers.
Even if you just look at the COLA increases, and compare them to the CPI, according to ABAG the CPI has increased 10.9% in the last five years through 2006, so their COLA raises are higher than that. COLA raises are supposed to reflect the cost of living only, yet they have been consistently higher than the cost of living.
In the meantime, in the private workforce, raises have actually been below the CPI, about 1.3% currently in Napa. Private industry workers typically get only merit increases, a "raise" that is based mostly on performance, and to some extent on longevity.
Because we can’t be certain exactly what the negotiations specifically are about, I plan to raise the following points tomorrow.
1. The Napa Valley Taxpayers Alliance is here today because we are concerned that unless employee costs are reigned in, the County is going to head down the same path of structural deficits and technical bankruptcy that the City of Napa is now in, that the State of California is now in, and that local governments across the state are now in.
2. The Budget document itself says that a relatively small increase in County costs could push us into a structural imbalance. What that means in plain english is that you already know before the year begins that you don’t have enough money to pay for what you are already obligated to pay for. It means you’re broke.
3. One good example of where those costs could come that would push the County into deficits with no revenue to cover it would be if the Probation Dept pensions were to be increased to the enhanced safety level. We feel that the safety pensions for Sheriff’s are already too rich and to continue to push other groups of employees into that high level of pension is fiscal insanity.
Only three short years ago the Probation employees along with the other miscellaneous employees were given a 25% increase in their pensions, going from 2% at 55 to 2.5% at 55. This resulted in the unfunded liability increasing in those three short years from $26.9 million to $48.7 million. Now they want another large increase, which is going to further increase the unfunded liability dramatically, and therefore create large increases in annual payments to Cal Pers.
Most people in this room know that just to cover an unfunded liability for retiree health and other benefits, the Supervisors recently voted to pay $4.1 million per year for 14 years to cover it. That is about the total amount we are currently able to spend on roads in the County, and that amount is woefully inadequate.
We cannot afford another multi- million dollar annual liability which enhancing probation pensions represents without serious further cut backs in service as well as leading toward a City of Napa perpetual budget crisis situation.
4. Long term we cannot afford to give public employees in Napa County or anywhere else higher raises and benefit increases than the taxpayers are earning themselves, for they are the ones who have to make the money to have to pay for it. It is an unsustainable system economically and it doesn’t really matter whether or not certain employees deserve certain benefits, it is bankrupting the system.
Ok, that is probably way more than I will have time to say. I am hoping that some other members will bring up a few more points like:
1. Wages for private employees have been below the rate of inflation, the CPI, for almost a decade now. This however is not true for government employees, whose wages have grown much faster than inflation.
2. Miscellaneous County employees have enjoyed a 17.5% increase in wages just on COLA’s alone over the last five years, law enforcement 25.2%, while the Bay Area CPI has been 10.9%. County employees have also received step increases and often large equity increases in that time as well.
3. The fact that 911 operators or Probation officers both of whose jobs consist mainly of office work can be included in safety pensions undermines the whole rationale of a safety pension.
Safety pensions were originally conceived for those risking their lives in the line of duty. I suppose anyone who drives to work could be portrayed as risking their life for their job, but it is clear that both 911 operators and Probation Dept work are not nearly on the same level of risk as fire and police work, and just asking for these level of pensions betrays the fact that this is just about seeing how much money they can get, and is not justified.
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