Budget/Fiscal

A group of bipartisan California mayors – including San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed (D), San Bernardino Mayor Pat Morris (D), Santa Ana Mayor Miguel Pulido (D), Anaheim Mayor Tom Tait (R) and Pacific Grove Mayor Bill Kampe (D) – have filed a statewide ballot initiative to provide state and local governments with the tools needed to fix California’s unsustainable public employee retirement plans.

“The Pension Reform Act of 2014 would amend the California Constitution to give government agencies clear authority to negotiate changes to existing employees’ pension or retiree healthcare benefits on a strictly going-forward basis,” a release stated on Tuesday.  “The measure explicitly protects retirement benefits government employees have already earned, while allowing benefits to be modified for future years of service.”

It is a thought provoking if not outright provocative article that veteran columnist Peter Schrag put out last Friday, noting the liberal tendency to “blame everything that went wrong in California, from power failures to kidnapping, on Proposition 13,” but nonetheless suggestions that while “the tax-cutting initiative was not the cause of all that ailed the state … as state and local officials remain in deep denial on California’s mounting multibillion-dollar unfunded public employee pension and retiree health care obligations, it’s time to return to the subject.”

The question at hand, “Did Proposition 13 help create the conditions that have contributed mightily to those unfunded liabilities?”