Editorial: Culture of public perks must change

Managers of the people’s money – in the county’s case, elected supervisors and top-level department heads – should keep their sharpest focus these days on the unit cost of employees.
That unit cost of county employees has been rising rapidly in recent years due to such liability as lavish retiree health care and, as we learned at last week’s county board meeting, a continually inflating CalPERS rate, which is going up 50 percent this year.
County supervisors are the last line of defense for taxpayers against this type of spending nonsense. They must make it a priority to get started immediately on negotiations to reduce the county’s unnecessary liability and get public sector workers’ compensation more in line with private sector counterparts.
In recent discussions, supervisors have broached the staggering numbers at stake – the $3.5 million annual bill, or $11,000 per employee, it costs taxpayers annually to fund workers’ guaranteed health care for life after they retire, and the aforementioned 50 percent hike for CalPERS, another multimillion-dollar bill each year for local taxpayers. For context, and to show the obscene nature of the expense, that $3.5 million figure for retiree health care makes up more than 10 percent of the county’s entire general fund budget of around $30 million.
The bottom line is that these types of perks are out of line with what is affordable – let’s not forget that we’re a poor county – and what should be expected on top of a decent salary and other benefits.
Unfortunately, there are remnants of the political mindset and fragile backbone that got us into this mess. After supervisors earlier this month were told that the county faces a record number of reassessment requests in the assessor’s office, the first thought expressed from supervisors was to hire back some of the people who were recently laid off.
The more obvious solution – one with fixed, more affordable costs – is to outsource the additional work and continue examining other areas of government where alternative solutions to the budget crisis would be more efficient and less costly.
Local politicians all too often throw up their arms and blame their supposedly unworkable challenges on state politics or the economy. The assessor’s office and its temporary problem is one area where supervisors can keep their arms down and find meaningful savings by taking a creative approach.
If the county falls back on the old, simple solution of hiring back laid-off workers, those hires would further propagate the growing liability. And what would the county do with those employees once this current trend changes or reverses?
Whether it is liability related to pensions, retiree health care or temporary spikes in an office’s workload, it is time for supervisors to start immediate negotiations with the unions and correct some of these travesties now costing taxpayers millions of dollars each year.