After bankruptcy, Moorlach was appointed treasurer, won another term, and then won terms as a county supervisor before heading to Sacramento. He remains one of the few lawmakers with actual math skills. His 2013 recollection sums up the problem aptly: “Our bankruptcy was a colossal accumulation of unnecessary errors and irresponsible actions done independently by a significant number of individuals from various financial and public sector disciplines, both inside and outside of county government, all of whom should have known better.”
Since then, Moorlach has been waving red flags about another approaching financial calamity. It involves California’s unfunded pension liabilities, brought on by politicians and pension funds more interested in boosting public-employee compensation than protecting the public’s assets. Officials should know better, but have been reacting to Moorlach’s warnings the same way they did in 1994. Some critics even have reprised the Chicken Little epithet.
...Transparent California to grasp the size of the compensation packages — check out the number of police sergeants receiving more than $350,000 a year — that led to the problem.
...A new CalPERS report shows average local government police and firefighter pension costs have reached 50 percent of pay — a level former CalPERS chief actuary Ron Seeling warned a decade ago would be in his view ‘unsustainable.’
... Some California cities, even in Orange County, are floating pension-obligation bonds, which allow them to take out new debt to pay their pension debt. Essentially, localities are betting that their investment returns will continually outpace the bonds’ interest rates. Let’s hope they’re better at this than Citron was.
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