CalPERS' headquarters in Sacramento. (Photo: Coolcaesar/en.wikipedia)A new CalPERS projection shows employer rates for the largest group of state workers increasing 27 percent over the next six years — but the focus is on the risk of how much things can change.
A superior court judge overturned a freeze on retiree health care for Los Angeles city attorneys this month, citing some of the same case law that made public pensions a vested right that can only be cut if offset by a new benefit.
Well over half of California’s 120 state legislators come from local government – the 450-plus city councils, the 58 boards of supervisors, the 1,100 school districts and the other local bodies that do the heavy lifting of day-today governance.
But once they get to Sacramento, the perspective changes. And if blaming Sacramento is common at
An effort is under way in the Capitol to require local governments to perform comprehensive economic impact studies of so-called “superstores” before approving the projects.
The thorny issue pits big-box, general-service, non-union retailers such as Wal-Mart against small businesses and organized labor, who believe the huge stores unfairly compete and spark downward economic spirals. It
It began as a seemingly benign attempt to protect California’s daily homeless population of 160,000 but it has turned into a significant political dispute, with local governments across the state saying the plan would hamstring their authority and make a bad situation far worse.
At issue is a difficult balancing act between empathy for
CalPERS last week gave some 1,575 local governments a small increase in their annual pension costs, one of the last rates kept low by unusual actuarial policies adopted after a $100 billion investment loss five years ago.
As a slowly improving economy bolsters government budgets, CalPERS is considering changes in investment and actuarial policies
Big Soda spent big bucks. That’s how it defeated ballot measures to create soda taxes in two California towns.
In Richmond, in the Bay Area, and in El Monte, east of Los Angeles, the measures would have added a penny-an-ounce tax on soda. Had the taxes passed, they were projected to raise millions of
The CalPERS board may make it more costly for struggling local governments to close their pension plans.
A pending change is driven in part by unusually low interest rates and the fear of an unlikely, but now not inconceivable, collapse of a large employer like the bankrupt city of San Bernardino.
The cost