04-28-10, Harry Zavos Comments on
The Glendale News-Press April 24th front
page story, “Pensions:
City can’t keep up with cost”, reports
(if I recall correctly) what is the City's first public acknowledgment of
the strain on its finances due to its employee pension benefits arrangements (which
are administrated though CALpers, the state
Public Employees Retirement System) and for the first time has stated that
those arrangements are unsustainable.
Over the last few years Herbert Molano has periodically appeared before the City Council (particularly
when employee contracts were up for renewal) and presented trend data from
the City that he obtained and analyzed.
Based on that analysis, and
considering that the CALpers' fund for benefit
payments is in investments subject to the stock market and housing bubble, he
warned and predicted that unless the City took a different tack on pay and
pension benefits, what the City has now acknowledged would eventually occur.
The
Why did the City not take steps to
deal with the problem then instead of waiting until now when we have come
to the point that further cuts in City services needed to meet our liability to
CALpers to cover our dramatically increasing pension
commitments will cut to the bone?
HARRY ZAVOS, Glendale