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LA WATCHDOG - The Mayor and the City Council are planning to transfer more than 1,000 City employees to the Department of Water and Power according to Gus Corona, the Business Manager of IBEW Local 18, that represents over 90% of the DWP employees. His concern is that “this reckless decision could drain tens of millions from the Water and Power Employees Retirement System, putting employees benefits at risk.”
Ratepayers also have reasons to be concerned.
This transfer is a payoff to the City’s civilian unions who are opposed to the Mayor’s budget balancing proposal to lay off 1,647 civilian employees. Instead of layoffs, the Mayor and City Council are planning to dump some of these employees onto DWP even if there are not available positions or the employees do not have the necessary qualifications for an engineering intensive and customer facing enterprise.
In effort to provide transparency, there are many questions that need to be answered by Katy Yaroslavsky and Tim McOsker, the chairs of the Budget and Personnel Committees, and the City Administrative Officer.
- Who will be eligible to transfer to DWP? And how much will this “save” the City?
- Will employees of selected departments be excluded?
- Will it include employees who are eligible for retirement from the City and will then be paid by DWP (the “double dip”) and at the same time accrue DWP pension benefits.
- Why not use the Early Retirement Incentive Plan that was implemented in 2009?
- What is the impact on LACERS (Los Angeles City Employees Retirement System), the $23 billion pension plan for civilian employees?
- What is the impact on the $21 billion Water and Power Employees' Retirement Plan? Will LACERS transfer assets to WPERP to cover the accrued benefits of the transferred employees?
- Where will the transferred employees be assigned? Are there open positions? Do they have the necessary qualifications? Does DWP need 1,000 new employees?
- What is the payroll for the transferred employees? More than $100 million? And how will it impact on our water and power rates?
In any case, it appears that the Mayor and the City Council will force Ratepayers to pay for their fiscal malfeasance caused by their approval of budget busting labor agreements, relying on overly optimistic revenue projections, and underestimating expenditures, especially those related to legal settlements and judgments. This is in addition to the almost $740 million that Ratepayers will pay to the City through the Electricity Users Tax and the Power Revenue Transfer. Ratepayers need to remember this fleecing when they go to the ballot box in 2016.
[Note: Corona has reasons to be concerned, very concerned. There is chatter at City Hall about merging underfunded LACERS with the fully funded WPERP. Not only would his members be put at risk, but the Ratepayers would end up footing the bill.]
(Jack Humphreville writes LA Watchdog for CityWatch. He is the President of the DWP Advocacy Committee, the Budget and DWP representative for the Greater Wilshire Neighborhood Council, and a Neighborhood Council Budget Advocate. He can be reached at: [email protected].)
