The City Council, which has avoided deep pension reforms — and could lash out at Riordan — counts two notorious double dippers in its ranks.
Dennis Zine draws $102,692 in "retirement" from his previous job as an LAPD traffic cop, plus he's paid a hefty $178,789 salary as a perfectly robust member of the Los Angeles City Council. Bernard Parks, former LAPD chief, gets a yearly "retirement" pension of $290,607, but he's not really retired — he's paid $178,789 in his busy job on the council.
Richard Riordan,
former mayor of L.A.
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Public servants Zine ($281,481 total) and Parks ($469,396 total) may be part of the nation's 1 percent.
The City Council recently approved Villaraigosa's plan to raise the city retirement age to 65 from 55, an extremely early age that encouraged topnotch, healthy people to become double dippers. But the mayor's fix applies only to new hires, not to the sea of 50,000 workers. And Villaraigosa and the City Council exempted cops, firefighters and, interestingly, DWP workers — whose powerful union strikes fear in the hearts of City Council members.
Villaraigosa claims he's saving $30 million to $70 million — pocket change, really. But even this mild reform prompted public-employee unions to cry betrayal, comparing Villaraigosa, a liberal Democrat and former teachers union organizer, with Wisconsin's Republican Gov. Scott Walker.
"Some will say that workers are being attacked," says Jonathan Wilcox, a Republican campaign strategist on Riordan's launch team. "But that's not true. ... Workers of the city and those who need services have everything to lose if we don't turn back from the brink."
"I don't think it's a very well thought-out plan," disagrees Service Employees International Union Local 721 president Bob Schoonover. "I don't think it's going to accomplish what [Riordan] thinks."
On Monday, an SEIU Local 721 press release declared: "One of the richest men in the city has just declared war on working people."
Schoonover warns that under Riordan's reform, new hires at City Hall would begin paying their investments into a 401(k)-type plan, meaning that a long-existing revenue stream from new employees could no longer be tapped to pay other workers' retirement checks.
Riordan quips: "It sounds to me like [Bernie] Madoff got out of prison and came up with that one." He admits that Schoonover is probably right about the lost revenue to the existing pension pool. But he says the existing approach can't sustain itself.
"The bottom line is, new employees are unlikely to see a penny of the pension money they put in," Riordan says. "With a 401(k), new employees will at least have control of their money. Even if the city goes bankrupt."
Schoonover downplays talk of bankruptcy, saying, "We go through bumps in the road — and, given, this is a really big bump. But there's no reason to think that the pension system is in really big trouble. Pension liability is due over a long period of time. It's not due tomorrow."
But some veteran political observers are using apocalyptic metaphors to describe L.A.'s pension liabilities: a time bomb, an asteroid, a black hole. Warns Fleming: "If we don't do anything, this town's gonna look like Detroit."
The question is whether Los Angeles voters will follow San Jose and San Diego in approving dramatic changes next May.
