Mill Valley resident David Brown is taking the county to court, asking a judge to decide whether the county Board of Supervisors and other public agencies broke state law in approving workers’ pension enhancements with little or no public involvement in their decision-making process.
The 2014-15 Marin County Civil Grand Jury raised that question in its report, but the most definitive legal finding it made was that the public agencies “appear to have” side-stepped state rules.
The grand jury is not a court of law. On this issue, it raised a valid question, one that deserves a clear ruling.
That’s what Brown is seeking. As a taxpayer, he’s entitled to that and, unfortunately, he has to file a lawsuit to get it. Unfortunately, he got a dose of blowback from the county.
The county, in its required response to the grand jury, didn’t admit that it violated the law, but said it substantially complied.
That’s pretty lame. It’s sort of like telling a police officer who pulls you over for rolling through a stop sign that you had sort of stopped.
Many of the pension boosts in question were approved between 2001 and 2006. Those were the days, before the recession and Wall Street’s crash, municipalities were improving workers’ pensions because their increased cost was amply covered by double-digit returns on pension fund investments.
They were shortsighted promises that many agencies have had trouble keeping. The rising cost of keeping those promises has resulted in cuts in service, layoffs, increases in taxes and fees and, in some cases, having to borrow or dive into reserve funds.
Unraveling these pensions at this point would be unfair to workers who have counted on them. Too much time has passed.
Keeping those promises should be a paramount consideration.
But Brown deserves an answer to his question.
It is not, as County Counsel Steve Woodside called it, “an abuse of the legal process.”
The public deserves clarity.
“The grand jury found that the public employers appear to have violated these requirements in a variety of ways providing little, if any, notice to the citizens of Marin County that they would be responsible in the future for hundreds of millions of dollars of pension costs,” the grand jury’s report said. For instance, the grand jury reported that the long-term debt of the Marin County Employees Retirement Association, the county pension fund, went from a $26.5 million surplus in 2000 to a $536 million long-term debt in 2013.
As this log of debt was rolling, taxpayers were kept in the dark, unaware of audit reports and unable to keep pace with agencies’ rapid-fire approval processes.
Pension enhancements cited in the grand jury report were approved without adequate public review. If audits were prepared, the reports and their details were unknown to the public. And, in some cases, new benefits were approved as “consent calendar” items on agencies’ agendas, a designation typically reserved for business for which officials decide no public discussion is warranted.
The county Board of Supervisors and other Marin agencies have promised to do a much better job of informing taxpayers of the short- and long-term costs of workers’ contracts well ahead of their vote to approve them.
They should be held to those promises. They should make these promises written policies to be followed.
But what’s crystal clear is that the cost of this so-called “abuse of the legal process” will cost taxpayers far less than the county is spending.
