Monday afternoon San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi arrived at City Hall's basement...
...with fourteen boxes filled with petitions in support of his pension reform proposal to be placed on the ballot this November.
It was a low-key affair attended by a handful of supporters, most of them from the 2009-2010 Grand Jury which warned about the "pension tsunami" in one of their reports last year, including Craig Weber (above left).
The requirement for this ballot measure is 47,000 valid San Francisco voters' signatures...
...and according to Adachi's count, they turned in 72,559 signatures for vetting by the Department of Elections.
Adachi was first elected for Public Defender after a hard-fought election with the local political machine's selection, Kimiko Burton, daughter of former State Senator and powerbroker John Burton.
All of the other so-called pension reformers were appointed by that same political machine (Supervisor Elsbernd by then-Mayor Gavin Newsom, Ed Lee by a back-room cabal led by former Mayor Willie Brown and Chinatown fixer Rose Pak). Adachi feels like one of the last independent politicians in San Francisco.
I need to dig into the details of the pension reform stuff. I am instinctively distrustful as usually this sort of thing is meant to solve budget problems by dinging the people who work for the city. Now I may have beefs with the people who work for the city, but there at scads of genuine rich people in this town and there ought to be some way to get them to fork over more toward our collective well-being.
ReplyDeleteI've always liked and supported Adachi, but he has to make his case for why the pension system is where someone should get hurt. We made promises; is he asking us to renege on them?
Dear Jan: I share some of your disquiet, but having listened to Adachi and members of the Civil Grand Jury who got a look at the numbers which are leading to the coming municipal fiscal disaster, I changed my mind.
ReplyDeleteAlso, the public safety unions (fire and police), with their 80% out-of-town employees, have become a toxic mixture of entitled, greedy, corrupt and lazy. They seem to exist in some fantasy world where even though they're being paid six figure salaries with generous health benefits and pensions for life, they still seem to believe that they would get twice as much in the private sector. This seems to be a universal belief among San Francisco municipal employees, and where do you start with that kind of magical thinking?