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Lavish
Pensions for Upper Crust Court
Execs
By MARIA DINZEO July 14, 2011
SAN FRANCISCO (CN) -- With the
bitter medicine of a $350 million cut to the judicial branch budget being
administered this week, a lavish perk provided to the top 30 state court
bureaucrats has come under fire. Unlike ordinary businesses, where it violates
federal law to topload a pension plan, the state
court bureaucracy gives its most privileged a full 22% ride on top of their
rich salaries.
Someone making roughly $200,000, such as the
former financial director for the court administration, received $45,000 more,
all of it paid for with public money tithed against the taxpayer.
And while the ex-finance director has traded
those benefits into a lesser local fund in his new job as head clerk in San Bernardino, the top
thirty members of the central court bureaucracy, including its director and
assistant director, continue to receive the lavish benefit.
"Pension benefits shouldn't be given out
like candy," said San Diego Superior Court Judge Daniel Goldstein.
The trial judge said the former chief justice,
Ron George, pushed for the benefit, which has been getting attention along with
a series of controversies, which some call scandals, over budget priorities.
Last October, 3.5 percent retroactive pay
increases were handed out to eight out of ten of the AOC's
roughly 950 employees. That action came during a period when courts were being
closed one day a month, staff were being furloughed or let go, and judges took
a voluntary pay cut.
Then in February of this year, with the financial
crisis only getting deeper, the administrators received television coverage
over another lesser privilege, distributing iPads for
top-level staff. A memo from the head of the information services division at
the administrative office said the distribution of the iPads
was in order "to review tablet technology as an alternative to traditional
laptops."
The iPads came on top
of the laptops that were already issued to the staff. At the time, Associate
Justice Terence Bruiniers suggested on camera that
the alternative to the iPads was returning to pencil
and paper.
The freespending ways
of the judiciary's central bureaucracy -- from an extraordinarily expensive IT
project to the relatively minor distribution of electronic gadgets -- are the
subject of profound criticism from trial judges. They also descibe
the accommodations for the brass in San Francisco as "opulent" and
"plush," while jurors in local trial courts spread through the rest
of California work for next to nothing in what the trial judges describe as
"relative shabbiness."
But the most controversial of the various
privileges granted to the top administrators is the extraordinary pension
benefit.
A spokesperson for the AOC said, "It is not
uncommon for public sector employers to pay for all or most of employee's share
of the retirement benefits."
It is, however, uncommon to topload
a pension by almost a quarter of the salary, even for government institutions.
In Oregon,
for example, the State Court Administrator does not discriminate between the
top and bottom employees, offering a modest six percent bump to salaries for
pension payments. The agency's benefits manager, who asked that her name not be
used, said her office pays the six percent employee contribution for
"everyone from Judicial Specialist I all the way up the Chief Justice of
the Supreme Court."
"There's nothing that the top level staff get that everybody doesn't get," said the Oregon adminstrator.
Federal law does not allow employers to topload pension plans and discriminate in favor of the most
powerful and best paid employees, said CPA Karen Covel
with the San Diego firm Lauer, Georgatos & Covel in San Diego.
"Qualified plans as we know them are
subject to nondiscrimination rules, the intent of which is to ensure that the
plan doesn't favor higher-paid employees. All qualified plans maintained by
private employers are subject to the nondiscrimination requirements," Covel said.
The California
Legislature, however, passed a law that allows state agencies to avoid the
federal rules, and topload the plans as well as avoid limits on the percentage of salary that can be added
on as a pension benefit. "It's a whole different ball game when it comes
to government benefits," said Covel.
Judge Goldstein in San Diego said the privileged pension was
added onto the compensation of the top brass by the old chief justice even as
trial courts were closing their doors.
"While trial courts were closing and we
were thinking, `gosh what can we cut,' while we were closing our doors to the
public, these folks wouldn't give up that benefit." said Goldsetein. "It's a joke to say 'well, it's in the
government code.' Is it legal? Yes. Is it wrong? Yes. It's not the right thing
to do."
In a letter sent to Goldstein last April, AOC general
counsel Mary Roberts called the contribution "consistent with the
practices of other judicial branch entities including the Supreme Court . . .
and the majority of trial courts."
Goldstein challenged that statement, saying his
court does not pay any of its employees' expected retirement contributions, and
that in fact, San Diego
judges are required to contribute eight percent of their monthly paychecks to
their retirement.
According to a memo from Roberts, most rank and
file AOC employees are expected to pay five percent into their retirement plans,
and the AOC boosts that by 16.4% for some 17.5% for others.
But the 30 top executives do not pay anything out of
their salaries for a benefit that is very generous by any standard, public or
private. The taxpayer, through the AOC, contributes 22.5% on top of the court
executive's salary.
"If it was the right thing to do, they'd
offer it to everybody," Goldstein said. "But that perk is taking
money out of the taxpayer's pocket."
For Goldstein, who teaches a class in legal
ethics in addition to working as a judge, the right thing to do would be to get
rid of the perk altogether.
"It really is a slap in the face," he
said, "to judges and staff and everybody that's been taking cuts so that
these bureaucrats in San Francisco
can get the perk that nobody else gets." http://www.courthousenews.com/2011/07/13/38132.htm