The most important item buried in today's City Council Agenda is summarized by a friend in an email early this morning:
Increased pensions for fire chief and police chief -- I understand that the city just negotiated a 2% at 50 with the fireman. But on the agenda is a consent calendar for 3% at 50 for the Fire Chief and 3% at 55 for Police Chief---seems we are going in the wrong direction for those two.
One might hope that our City Council has been following the public employee pension CRISIS and might be more immune to union pressure to maintain these overly generous and lucrative pension packages.
Find out what's happening in Fountain Valleywith free, real-time updates from Patch.
The Council needs to be asked where they've been re. merging the FV and Huntington Beach Fire Departments (I've heard it "fell through" -- why?) and what happened to the notion of outsourcing Fire to the Orange County Fire Authority as Costa Mesa is apparently doing for a SAVINGS. CM Mayor pro tem Righeimer (a former FV resident) has done some excellent work with reducing costs in their city and dealing with the OCFA as an outsource -- before these lucrative packages are approved, I'd strongly suggest he be invited to the next Council Meeting (or a special session) and asked to speak to CM's experience with outsourcing, not only Fire, but also the successes they've had with paramedics. Costa Mesa will have recent research and good numbers on the savings they have or will achieve if they turn their Fire operation over to the County. As well, our County Supervisor John Moorlach (a CPA) also has excellent experience and background on pension issues, and he should be asked to review this issue and publicly comment.
While our City is generally in better fiscal condition than our neighbors, we were still placed in the embarrassing position of having to roll out a unique Paramedic Membership Program, a voluntary program that begs $60 annually from each of our families to subsidize a service that should, without question, be completely paid out of our tax contributions. It's ludicrous that this contribution must be requested to fund our Paramedics, and yet the Council can consider these overly generous retirement benefits that have no comparison to what those of us in the private sector enjoy and we can't likely afford and our children will pay for. In fact, like Costa Mesa, paramedic services should be considered for outsourcing if a vendor can provide the same services level for a savings.
I also believe we should be voting on this issue -- there's enough money involved here, especially considering the long-term impact, that perhaps it should be a City-focused Initiative on the June or November ballot. Like most City Councils, ours appears afraid to challenge the powerful police and fire unions -- by taking the decision out of their hands and placing it where it really belongs -- in ours. And let's never mind what it costs to place the issue on a ballot -- these issues are why we have a sophisticated election system and a democratic society.
