http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-pension-crisis-davis-deal/With the stroke of a pen, California Gov. Gray Davis signed legislation that gave prison guards, park rangers, Cal State professors and other state employees the kind of retirement security normally reserved for the wealthy.
More than 200,000 civil servants became eligible to retire at 55 — and in many cases collect more than half their highest salary for life. California Highway Patrol officers could retire at 50 and receive as much as 90% of their peak pay for as long as they lived.
Proponents sold the measure in 1999 with the promise that it would impose no new costs on California taxpayers. The state employees’ pension fund, they said, would grow fast enough to pay the bill in full.
They were off — by billions of dollars — and taxpayers will bear the consequences for decades to come.
...
Davis, who was elected in 1998 with more than $5 million in campaign contributions from public employee unions, says that if he had it to do over, he would not support the pension improvements.
“There was no real taxpayer representation in that room,” Seeling, now retired and living in a Dallas suburb, said in a recent interview. “It was all union people. The greed was overwhelming.”
...
State pensions are funded by regular deductions from workers’ paychecks and contributions from the state. CalPERS invests the money to cover future benefits.
The employee contribution, typically determined through collective bargaining, remains fairly constant. The employer contribution fluctuates based on CalPERS investment returns.
By far the largest group of state workers — office workers at the Department of Motor Vehicles, the Department of Social Services and dozens of other agencies — contributed between 5% and 11% of their salary in 2015, and the state kicked in an additional 24%. To fund their more costly benefits, Highway Patrol officers contributed 11.5% of pay and the state added 42%.
