My mother taught me a number of things to never do. Among them: never ask a woman her age and never ask someone else how much money they make.
The first of those no-no’s may still be widely observed but the second seems to have gone out the window, at least when it comes to retired public employees.
Recently some media outlets have published the names and the dollar amounts of benefits being received by retirees from the County of Santa Barbara and the City of Santa Barbara. (Full disclosure: my name appears on the list of retired county employees.)
Craig Smith
One outlet published the names and monthly allowances of all 2,904 retired County employees while noting that 152 of them receive pensions of over $100,000 per year. (And no, I’m not one of those lucky ones.) That’s about five percent of the total number of retirees meaning 95 percent of retired County employees receive less (and in most cases far less) than $100,000 per year.
Another published the names and salaries of the 29 retired City employees with pensions of $100,000 or more per year. The “editorial” which listed this information didn’t reveal the total number of City retirees so there is no opportunity to determine what percentage of total retirees those 29 individuals represents.
Useless data?
Now, I’m not saying that publishing the names and amounts received by retirees has no value. Being a person who knows a lot of the people whose names appear on the list, I like to check and see who’s making what so I can figure out which one of us ought to be picking up the tab when we meet up for lunch or to have a drink.
But as for the rest of you out there I’d say this list of names and numbers is pretty useless.
After all, if you want to talk about a ship that’s sailed the S.S. Pension Benefit has left the dock. Lock the barn door after the horse is gone? My friend Flicka hasn’t been seen for years. You can’t change the benefits of those who put in their years, had a deduction for retirement taken out of their pay checks every month and now have left their jobs and have made their plans accordingly. I guess if one wants to make this about the politics of division and you’re looking for a boogeyman, the handful of comfortably retired public employees fits that bill nicely. But if you want to have a meaningful debate about reform in this area, there’s no need to make it personal.
I’d like to be able to claim that the monthly retirement benefit that I receive was the product of careful planning on my part, but that’s not the case. I remember being hired to work in the district attorney’s office right out of law school and looking at my first paycheck stub. I had to ask one of my co-workers what the money being taken out of my paycheck under the heading “retirement deduction” was for.
Loving retirement
Once it was explained to me I remember thinking to myself, “I wish they wouldn’t take that out, I’m not going to be sticking around here long enough to retire.” Nearly 25 years later when I finally did retire from county employment I was grateful that I didn’t have the choice of opting out of the retirement system. It was the best decision I never made. It was made for me.
I imagine many of the nearly 3,000 retired county employees are in the same boat I was. If we are accomplices in some type of public employee pension benefit boondoggle, then we’re unwitting accomplices. If you want to talk about how we’re going to handle public employee retirement in the future, then go ahead. But, do you really have to drag my name and the names of all of the other public employment retirees into it? After all, it’s really kind of rude.
Craig Smith is a blogger and observer of the local cultural scene.
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