Articles for category Retirees
SANTA ROSA — A two-house legislative committee is working with Gov. Brown’s Department of Finance on a ‘hybrid’ retirement plan for new state and local government hires, a committee member told a forum here last week.
Assemblyman Michael Allen, D-Santa Rosa, twice referred to a “cash balance” plan while talking about a cost-cutting hybrid, proposed by Brown, that combines a lower pension with a 401(k)-style individual investment plan.
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When the city manager of troubled Stockton, Calif., had to tell city council members why it was on track to become the biggest American city yet to go bankrupt, it took hours to get through the list.
There was the free health care for retirees, the unpaid parking tickets, the revenue bonds without enough revenue to pay them. On it went, a grim drumbeat of practically every fiscal malady imaginable, except an obvious one: municipal pensions. Stockton is spending some $30 million a year to pay for them, but it has less than 70 cents set aside for every dollar of benefits its workers expect.
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Health benefits for government retirees may not be eliminated if state and local governments had clearly promised workers those benefits, the California Supreme Court ruled in an Orange County case Monday.
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A new study by the Center for Retirement Research and Boston College refutes the notion that state and local government workers as a group end up a lot richer than their private sector counterparts. [Read More...]
Approximately half of California workers will retire in or near poverty, according to a study published Monday by the UC Berkeley Center for Labor Research and Education. [Read More...]
California’s largest state retiree organization
has
a new name and a new attitude about
standing
up to public pension critics [Read More...]
The time for CalPERS members to make changes to their health plan or add eligible family members begins Oct. 10 and continues through Nov. 4. In mid-August, CalPERS Open Enrollment packets were mailed to eligible members. [Read More...]
Faced with a growing pension burden, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the City Council moved this summer to freeze the amount of healthcare benefits given to thousands of police and firefighters once they retire. Those benefits would not increase in coming years, Villaraigosa said, unless employees contribute more toward retirement from their paychecks. [Read More...]
CalPERS Sept. 7, 2011 -- CalPERS is consolidating 49 different computer systems into one new integrated system this September. This new system will streamline many CalPERS processes as well as decrease dependency on paper documents. New member self-service capabilities will be introduced in 2012.
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Sacramento Bee Sept. 8, 2011 --Lawmakers essentially threw in the towel Thursday on comprehensive public pension reform - at least for now.
With this year's legislative session scheduled to end at midnight today, the Assembly voted 51-21 to approve a last-minute bill declaring its commitment to pension reform but conceding that more time is needed.
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