This morning Assemblyman Curt Hagman will have his bill, AB 2429, heard before the Assembly Public Employees, Retirement and Social Security Committee. This piece of legislation is very straightforward. Ask yourself, should a part-time elected official (most city councils, school boards, water boards and so on…) be taking down full-time employee benefits? If your answer is no, then Hagman’s bill is the way to go. Simply put, beginning with January of 2013, those elected to part-time local offices may not receive any benefits for service, other than the allowable stipend under state law. Right now the vast majority of the state’s over 25,000 local elected officials are not only getting their monthly stipends, but are also taking down gold-plated health care plans. In some cases, after being re-elected a second time, they are awarding these part-time officials with lifetime healthcare benefits. One particularly egregious practice is where the local elected waives the healthcare insurance, and the local government which they oversee then pays them cash in lieu of taking it!
If a position is full time — then I think everyone understands that it is from that office that you derive your full time income, and that health care and other benefits are appropriate. Where I live, in South Orange County, my local water board members (who oversee water service to maybe 20,000 homes) all take home Cadillac healthcare benefits. Never mind that the entire water district full-time staff is so small that the healthcare premiums from the part-time elected officials make up over a quarter of the total premiums. (They now have all been issued rate-payer funded iPads now, which I am sure come in handy for their official duties…). It’s probably worthy of note that the part-time staff members get no medical benefits.
Everyone I talk to is pretty incensed that part-time officials are getting taxpayer-funded healthcare. I have a number of good friends who were elected to city councils around Orange County in 2010, who collectively decided that none of them would take such benefits. Just about every one of them came back with stories about how “no one had ever asked’ to opt out before, and in many cases great efforts were made to change their minds. Still, they were successful, ultimately, in all opting out of taxpayer funded healthcare plan.
It is pretty clear that there is a whole cadre of part-time electeds (especially, it seems, hanging out on obscure water boards) that really ran for these positions not to be a public steward, but rather to pig out on benefits that come with the job. Passing AB 2429 out of it’s first policy committee, Assembly PERS, would be controversial. It would cause every part-time officeholder and candidate for part-time office to evaluate their commitment for service based on the idea that they are citizens giving back to their community, as opposed to the current paradigm where no doubt many are seeking the office in order to get the lucrative benefits.