The saga concludes.
The Retirement Board voted to make no adjustments to our pensions.
Details follow: Skip them if you want.
Rolly Something-or-other had the assignment to come up with money with which to pay off a $1.8 million deficit. So he accused us of improperly working extra hours in our final year to jack up our retirement. He showed slides of our last five years and said that all of us had higher on-call hours during the last year of employment. He took two hours to talk about all eleven of us. I figured we were done for. He called this improper. He wanted to correct the problem by comparing our final year with the one before it, and to subtract any extra on-call time from our pensions. Then he wanted to make the calculations retroactive and collect all back "overpayments" with 10% interest. In my case, I didn't work on call during my next to final year. Hence the bill to me was $107,000. It all looked very impressive, and I was scared we were done for.
Then we got to present. Jerry's wife is a lawyer, and she said that she'd never seen anything like this, and she said it with a great deal of passion. And she brought up my case as the most unbelievable, since, in their May meeting, that had said that they weren't going to adjust my pension at all, and now they wanted to collect $107,000 and cut my pension by and additional $800 per month.
Gabe's lawyer also brought up my case as a worst case scenario.
Other haz mats spoke, and three of them pointed out that the Retirement Board's councilors had encouraged them to work extra hours to maximize their retirement. Rolly's answer was that he had no evidence of that. Then Jerry brought out a memo from the retirement board urging us to not take a vacation in our final year in order to maximize retirement.
Eric pointed out that Rolly hadn't heard of retirement councilors recommending that emplees do extra work during their final year because he hadn't talked to any of them.
We were all nervous and upset.
I showed a graph of my on-call which was considerably below average. It had been presented at their May 6th meeting. I pointed out that Rolly had left out the fact that I had worked plenty of on-call in the past, and that on-call contributed to the pension fund, and that I was entitled to have on-call represented in my retirement check.
Then they discussed it. Four of the Board members said that if someone had told them to work extra hours during their final year to maximize retirement, they would have done it. There was nothing anywhere that said it was improper.
The improper action that they were comparing us to was in San Bernadino County where some responders (I think it was sheriffs) had bribed elected officials to get higher pension benefits. Deborah Allen (She wants to be elected to the Bart Board, and she's running on a platform of pension reform. Don't vote for her.) said that improper didn't mean that anyone had done anything bad. Just that the pension hadn't been calculated correctly and that we should make up the difference. (changing the story.)
Anyway, they voted not to collect anything, and not to change our pension amounts.
By the way, Rolly looks exactly the way I imagine Weasel to look, except that he's a little fatter than Weasel. He has this perfect Weasel-ly nose.
Happy steppin' everyone.