10 signatures reached
To: Anyone willing to help author a bill to save our retirement
CalPERS stealing our Retirement
The CalPERS Board doesn’t seem to care a bit about the devastation that they have wreaked on the East San Gabriel Valley Consortium (ESGVC) employees, whose dedication and hard work helped thousands of needy and imprisoned adults and youth via the human services mission of the ESGVC Joint Powers Agency; only to be made “an example of” by the CalPERS Board who cut our current and future pensions by 63.18%.
While the CalPERS Board previously set the precedent of saving 100% of the pensions of other terminating agencies personnel, CalPERS refused to treat our employees with the same equality and pension protection vigor. CalPERS developed a “risk pool” (Terminated Agency Pool -TAP) years ago, to protect pensioners from this very plight. This risk pool was SUPERFUNDED ($280Million) but CalPERS virtually turned its back on ESGVC pensioners and any future use of the risk pool to save other pensioners from catastrophic cuts. CalPERS will no longer protect its member’s pensions, and essentially told the ESGVC employees to “go pound sand” by inflicting an “across the board” pension cut of 63.18%. The CalPERS staff Actuary determined the ESGVC termination fee, based upon an aggregate of all ESGVC employees “potential pensions”, including those employees who were never vested in CalPERS. That approach caused a mushroomed and greatly INFLATED debt figure. Incredibly discriminatory, and some would say, very illegal; we are ALL paying for “ghost retirees” who will likely never have a CalPERS claim, because they cashed out of their CalPERS account ong ago. Yet, those "potential future debts" were included in the debt formula of our pension cuts.
CalPERS should do the right thing and fund the ESGVC CalPERS pensioners, in the same fashion they did for previous pensioners, through utilization of the CalPERS Terminated Agency Pool (TAP), the risk pool that was created for this very situation. BUT, what CalPERS did instead was they disingenuously closed the TAP, so we could not access it as the "insurance policy" is was designed for. At the very least, since we are the only pensioners in the entire multi-billion dollar CalPERS system, to have our pensions cuts by more than 1/2, CalPERS should have to recalculate our debt, taking out the "ghost pensioners" who are calculated in our debt, and provide a revised debt amount, that would return some percentage of our huge 63% cut.
While the CalPERS Board previously set the precedent of saving 100% of the pensions of other terminating agencies personnel, CalPERS refused to treat our employees with the same equality and pension protection vigor. CalPERS developed a “risk pool” (Terminated Agency Pool -TAP) years ago, to protect pensioners from this very plight. This risk pool was SUPERFUNDED ($280Million) but CalPERS virtually turned its back on ESGVC pensioners and any future use of the risk pool to save other pensioners from catastrophic cuts. CalPERS will no longer protect its member’s pensions, and essentially told the ESGVC employees to “go pound sand” by inflicting an “across the board” pension cut of 63.18%. The CalPERS staff Actuary determined the ESGVC termination fee, based upon an aggregate of all ESGVC employees “potential pensions”, including those employees who were never vested in CalPERS. That approach caused a mushroomed and greatly INFLATED debt figure. Incredibly discriminatory, and some would say, very illegal; we are ALL paying for “ghost retirees” who will likely never have a CalPERS claim, because they cashed out of their CalPERS account ong ago. Yet, those "potential future debts" were included in the debt formula of our pension cuts.
CalPERS should do the right thing and fund the ESGVC CalPERS pensioners, in the same fashion they did for previous pensioners, through utilization of the CalPERS Terminated Agency Pool (TAP), the risk pool that was created for this very situation. BUT, what CalPERS did instead was they disingenuously closed the TAP, so we could not access it as the "insurance policy" is was designed for. At the very least, since we are the only pensioners in the entire multi-billion dollar CalPERS system, to have our pensions cuts by more than 1/2, CalPERS should have to recalculate our debt, taking out the "ghost pensioners" who are calculated in our debt, and provide a revised debt amount, that would return some percentage of our huge 63% cut.
Why is this important?
This was an incredibly destructive and dark event in the CalPERS history, to allow pensioners who paid into the CalPERS system for decades to hang in the wind with 63% of their planned retirement taken away.
· Contracts were Irresponsible: CalPERS wrote pension contracts with well over 170 public Joint Powers Authorities (JPA). CalPERS staff wrote these contracts (building growth for the CalPERS fund) never making the JPA Founding Cities responsible for the CalPERS pensions. Without such a provision, the JPA employees had no knowledge of the peril their pension accounts were in. There was no way the JPA’s would fund their pension accounts in perpetuity. Developing CalPERS contracts, without a means to continue pension plan payments, was an irresponsible and horrendous error!
· Contracts were Irresponsible: CalPERS wrote pension contracts with well over 170 public Joint Powers Authorities (JPA). CalPERS staff wrote these contracts (building growth for the CalPERS fund) never making the JPA Founding Cities responsible for the CalPERS pensions. Without such a provision, the JPA employees had no knowledge of the peril their pension accounts were in. There was no way the JPA’s would fund their pension accounts in perpetuity. Developing CalPERS contracts, without a means to continue pension plan payments, was an irresponsible and horrendous error!
· No Social Security: We are/were public servants, who faithfully paid for decades into our PERS retirement accounts, and we deserved our full pensions. Our pensions have been slashed (since 2016) for reasons we had absolutely no control over. Additionally, the majority of us were prohibited from contributing to Social Security (couldn’t contribute to both SS and PERS) so we have no Social Security pensions to fall back on. Many have had to go back to work late in life, and everyone will be working into our 70’s and 80’s and never make up this retire.
Ghost Pensioners Included in Termination Fee:
Ghost Pensioners Included in Termination Fee:
CalPERS has applied absurd assumptions against us, and we are paying the price of “ghost pensioners” who will never be a cost to CalPERS:
1) The ESGVC $18M “termination fee” has been grossly inflated by the CalPERS Actuary, as follows:
calculated in the $18M termination “projection”, are many “ghost pensioners” who are deemed a “potential future cost”. The “ghost pensioners” are individuals who were never vested in CalPERS to start with, or withdrew ALL their funds from their PERS account (when they left public employment), but CalPERS says they MIGHT come back into the PERS system at some point in their lifetime. Additionally, CalPERS is applying an interest penalty of 2.8% to the Termination Fee of $18M, when it is CalPERS' shortcomings that caused this contract to exist in the first place. Legislators: Fortunately, for all rest of the JPA employees in the State of California, AB 1912 was passed to assure that what happened to the ESGVC pensioners doesn’t happen again. However, AB1912 did not resove the ESGVC pensioners devastation. ESGVC was excluded from eligibility for AB1912.
How it will be delivered
The whole group of ESGVC petioners will post to the FB pages, will send to the CalPER representatives and to others who could end up in a pension peril like us.