On
Wednesday, October 15th, the city council received a briefing
about the dismal state of the employee pension fund.
Randy Stalnacker, a city employee and board member of the Employees
Retirement Fund (ERF), Mr. Rowe from the State Pension Review Board (SPRB).
Also present was Luke Sweetser who was representing the Private sector
view for Mayor Miller. Basically,
this meeting was requested by the ERF to try to get the City Council to
set a date for a promised referendum on the pension funding.
The problem, according to Rowe, is that
Dallas
is one of the two
municipal pension funds in the state which has been historically under funded,
El Paso
is the other.
In September of 1999, the City Council had unanimously approved a
funding solution that was to be presented to the voters in May of 2002.
As we all know, no pension referendum has yet been placed before the
voters. Recently, Mr. Benavides was in
Austin
assuring the SPRB
that the city was committed to this referen-dum, wanted to correct the
problem, and would put the matter before the voters as soon as possible.
So everything is okay, right? Well no. It appears that the Mayor and
certain city council members reject the agreement and do not feel bound to
accept something that a previous council agreed to. Since it was only a
“council amendment”, they can vote to reject it if they want to.
Mayor
Miller will not allow her “hands to be tied” by a previous council.
She thinks that the funding gap problem can be solved in several
other ways. Such as;
- The
city can reduce benefits, (not an easy task, thanks to the recent
pension fund referendum passed last election.)
- The
city can increase the employees’ contributions, this requires a 75%
approval by the employees.
- The
city can “voluntarily” increase the contributions of both the city
and the employees in a 1:1 ratio. Currently the contributions formula
is 63% city – 37% employee. Again, this would require approval of
the employees. And, how could we trust that this deal will not be
overturned later? If not by them, then another city council?
- The
ERF Board could have members added to it to “balance” (dilute) the
influence of the THREE city employees currently serving on it. (TWO
employees are elected and one, the City Auditor, is appointed by the
City as it’s representative.)
If
you wish to see the full report you can go to http://www.cityofdallasemployees.com/retirementfundproblem20031015.pdf
To
read more on this topic please read Council
Tid-bits
Short
Term Disability Eliminated!
Somehow,
even though it did not cost much money, Short Term Disability has been
taken out of the employees benefit package.
The
how and when of this decision is a bit of a mystery. As I recall HR
arguing vehemently against it. Since our benefit package was already in
the lower 90th percentile of comparable benefits, one has to
wonder why? Seems a bit mean spirited.
Seemingly,
HR’s recommendations are accepted only when they co-incide with the
views of the person posing the questions. The Mayor seemed quite dismayed
when she was informed that we did not have a lavish benefit package ripe
for slashing. But ripe or not, slashed it was. Nice to be so appreciated,
isn’t it? - M.
A Wake Up Call for
City Employees
The budget for 2003-2004 has been passed and again the employees
were taken to the cleaner. I
know that with a strong enough presence and a loud enough voice we can
have a positive effect on the budget process.
This will take more members and members who are willing to speak
up. With this in mind I
continue to enroll new members.
Recently while speaking with city employees who have not joined,
they told me that there was nothing to do about this years budget, and
they wanted to take a ”wait and see” approach to next years budget.
They are expecting the council to be kinder.
WAKE
UP! - The uniformed employees were given a
promise of a 5% cost of living raise for 3 years and this was only year
two. Council member Steve
Salazar attempted to convince the council to raise the property tax by
.0242 so that the civilian employees could receive a 2% cost of living
this year, and his suggestion was voted down during briefing, never making
it to the full council meeting. The
Council cut $15.8 million from our health benefit package this year to
give the promised 5% raise to the same employees who receive their merit
raises.
Next year, except for
laying off more employees I do not believe the council will be able to
find any thing else to cut. Therefore
to keep their promise, the council will have to raise the property tax.
Now if a 2% for civilians would have required a raise of .0242,
then next years’ cost of living for the uniform employees will require a
property tax increase of about .05, which just happens to be the most the
tax may be raised without the possibility of a rollback election.
So guess what, if we do not make a showing starting now, if we do
not find citizen backers, we will go without a cost of living again in the
2004-2005-budget year. Which
by the way the city manager and mayor has all but made that promise to us
already!! – L.
Ed. Note – this was
written before the Pension Fund story broke. One of the things that the
City Manager mentioned last Wednesday is how ‘challenging’ it will be
next year to ‘try’ to find a way to fund the police raise, find
something for the civilians, and now find a way to make up the massive gap
in the pension fund. We civilian employees already have our backs up
against the wall, is time to stick together yet? - M.
Please
welcome Scott Newland
- New Grievance Rep for the Dallas Steelworkers Association
Mr.
Newland has been retired from the City of
Dallas
for 1 1/2 years. His retirement came after almost twenty-seven years
of service. He spent ten years with the Water Department and then
his remaining seventeen years with Code Compliance. During the last three
years he was a district manager. He has had experience with many
personnel issues, dealt with various administrations, city council
members, and been involved with both sides of the disciplinary and
grievance process.
Although
he was retired before we were chartered, Newland is committed to the
growth of the Steelworkers Association. You can reach Newland at
214-760-7422. His current schedule is Monday thru Thursday from
9
a.m.
to
1
p.m.
Grievances
- if you do one, do it right.
Grievances
- We would like to stress to all members the importance of contacting the
Local Union immediately after any disciplinary action is taken against
them. As your representative we only have five days from the date the
incident happened to file a grievance. We are also experiencing a problem
with members notifying us with appeal hearing dates. Sometimes we receive
notice the day before the hearing is to be held. This is not acceptable;
we may have another hearing scheduled for that day. So when you receive
the notice in the mail, you need to contact us immediately and let us know
what the hearing date is.
Injuries
-
We are also assisting employees when they are injured. We want to let all
members know that when they are injured they need to come by the Local
Union Office and pick up a business card and directions to our Doctors
Office.
The Doctors your Local Union uses are Union Doctors. They are
members of The Dallas AFL-CIO Council. They are Doctors Council Local
1199. Members should report their injury as soon as it happens. Get a copy
of the notice of injury report, and make sure all body parts that were
injured are listed on the report. Then the member needs to go to the Local
Union Doctor and get checked out. – R
Ed.
Note:
All grievance and injury actions need to be reported immediately to the
association office. The best case in the world, will be lost if it is
filed late, or has incorrect paper work. Copies of ALL correspondence
needs to be immediately forwarded to the Grievance Reps. This is
particularly important when you have your final resolution. A copy of that
needs to go in your file incase there are problems later, or someone else
has a similar problem that this would have a bearing on.
Grievance tracking, especially of the final resolutions are VERY
important to improving our working conditions in the city. - M
Humana
PPO – A Member’s
Concerns
I
would like to express my concerns about Humana PPO insurance. Humana
has been sued numerous times throughout the
US
for improper business
practice, but it looks like it will be the City of
Dallas
choice for employee
health insurance.
Humana
does NOT have a nationwide provider list like United Health Care, so what
will this mean to employees who don't live in
Dallas
? Will we even
be able to find physicians who will take the insurance? Many
physicians refuse to take it.
Secondly,
I am concerned about the "future option of insurance”, like Houston
ISD. This is "Consumer Driven Health Care", which means
that the employer provides a small, set amount of money and the employee
must attempt to find cheaper providers. Once that money is gone,
the employee may have to pay several thousand dollars before the
catastrophic insurance limits kick in. The average person does not
understand medical insurance components let alone this type of insurance.
This is an experiment being utilized by private industry. Humana is
pushing these types of insurance policies all over the country. The
City of
Dallas
is a governmental
agency, and as such should be considered with other such agencies, and not
with private industry.
With
United Health Care, the City was in the 10th percentile of health
benefits. The move to Humana will lower the benefits to about the
5th percentile, meaning that 95% of government agencies will have better
insurance. The decrease in employee benefits will ultimately create
a negative impact on recruitment of employees to work for the City of
Dallas
. – Email sent
by a Concerned Member to L. Perez
Council
Tid-bits – comments
& statements from the pension briefing.
After
the pension presentation the council asked several questions and made many
comments. Please see the highlights below.
Ms.
Miller picked
up her old “private industry” wheeze.
She stated that if private pension plans lost value, the employees were just out of
luck. Apparently, she refuses to remember that
municipal employees do not have access to Social Security as a
“fall back” plan, like ‘Private Industry’ employees do.
She declared that she will never vote for something that ties the
hands of future councils, she is incensed that the city contributes to the
fund at more than a 1:1 ratio. She also does not think the citizens are
smart enough to understand what they are voting for, so it makes no sense
to put it on a ballot. (But it was okay to commit the future council with
the
5-5-5
police package?)
Mr.
Rasansky
was upset that the tax payers would have to pay more money to fund the
retirement. He ranted for quite a while about the trading practices of the
fund management company, he wanted to know how the ERF board had gotten
the fund into such a state, ect. Even after being assured by Rowe and
Sweetser that the ERF and their management company had done an admirable
job in a terrible market, he was still upset and wanted them to hire a
better management firm. He did not seem reassured when he was informed
that the ERF management firm was the top firm in the entire country. He
stated that he would NEVER vote to put the previously agreed upon
automatic adjustment vote before the citizens, he doesn’t think the
citizens should have to pay.
Ms.
Lill wanted
to know what could be done. She asked the SPRB official Rowe, who
recommended that the problem be fixed now. And if that takes a referendum by the voters, so be it. If the
city council just wants to adequately fund it without the vote, that would
be wonderful. Perhaps the benefits need to be changed and the ERF board
needs to change in composition in order to make it answerable to the
people who pay the bills and not to the pensioners depending on it, fine.
But Rowe stressed that it need to happen now.
Ms.
Lill could
see that some changes may need to be made, however she did not want to
“water down” or lose the perspective of the employees on the board,
who are looking long term to make sure that they will still have a pension
when they are eighty. She
found it ironic that the council is demanding such a high level of
expertise on the pension fund board, when to sit down and decide a two
billion dollar city budget, it requires only that the council member be 18
and have lived in the district six months.
Mr.
Blaydes stated
that he will never vote for anything that removes power from the council.
He is “just not gonna do it.”
Mr.
Salazar
said, some blame should be on the economy and not just on the funding
scheme. He is open to looking at changes in what we can offer the new
employees, but for the employees that have 15 – 20 years, we need to
make sure that we make them whole, fully
funded. He wondered why the Council could not go again the employees and
ask them to vote themselves another increase.
It was at about this time that Benavides mentioned how difficult
this would be - since they
were currently discussing ways to reject the last agreement they had made
with the employees.
Mr.
Griffith
asked if Rowe thought it was better to give the leadership of the ERF more
control by doing the automatic funding and taking the politics out of it.
Rowe replied that that would be a positive step, because what ever
the city does, they need to do it and get on with it. They need to put
Dallas
in the mainstream and
fund our obligations.
Ms.
Greyson
wanted to know what the SPRB could do if the city did nothing. Rowe stated
Austin
can file lawsuits and
force the city to do what it should be doing to fully fund this pension
plan. Greyson felt that other
councils had taken actions that tied future councils hands and did not see
why this was so different. She also said that 401K plans are great, but if
they fail, as many of them are failing right now, we at least have Social Security to fall back on. The city employees
don’t have that luxury.
This is all they have. She thinks that council needs to remember that. she
recommend that council fully fund the program, so they
do not have to go to the voters with this.
- M
Amusing
Rumor
There is no truth to the
rumor that civilian office employees will be required to show up at the
beginning of the next fiscal year with boxes of staples, reams of paper
and enough pens and toner cartridges to get them through the year. Nor
will the field people have to provide their own shovels and gas for the
city trucks. Honest, it is a rumor… really people, how could anyone
could even think the City would consider such a thing.
;-)
