Unions Battle Reform in GOP Stronghold

“Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction,” said German psychologist Erich Fromm. Whatever greed does to one’s psyche, it does even worse things to public budgets. California, sinking amidst a structural $19 billion deficit and facing as much as one-half-trillion-dollars in pension debt, is paying the price for years of legislators giving away the store to public employee unions.

Yet even as unlikely sources (former Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, Treasurer Bill Lockyer and California Public Employees’ Retirement System chief actuary Ron Seeling) recognize the grave threat outrageous pension deals pose to the state’s long-term fiscal health, the state’s unions and Democratic leaders continue to operate as if there is no problem. The public seems increasingly agitated by the injustice of a situation that requires private sector workers to work late into life to pay the higher taxes needed so that public sector workers can retire in their early 50s with six-figure, cost-of-living-adjusted deals. But to the politicians, the unions still rule.

In my old haunts of Orange County, Calif., a particularly nasty race for the Board of Supervisors has been unfolding in the past month. On June 8, voters in that heavily Republican and generally anti-union county will fill the slot of a supervisor who has since been elected to the state Assembly.

Back in January, party leader Scott Baugh threw down the gauntlet after watching one Republican after another sell out to the state’s unions. In what has been referred to as the Baugh Manifesto, Baugh slammed Republicans for their role in expanding debt. He promised to use the party to hold Republicans accountable. He called for the party to do more than just endorse those with an “R” after their name. He made two specific demarcations: No Republican will get party support without backing a now-dead Paycheck Protection Initiative, which limits the ability of unions to use dues for political purposes. And no Republican will get party support “who receives contributions from public employee unions.”

It was tough stuff and the party has stuck to these demands.

In the supervisor’s race, the party and Baugh backed Fullerton City Councilman Shawn Nelson, a conservative who earned party kudos for his efforts to halt a 25-percent retroactive pension increase for Fullerton city workers. Nelson had contacted me, an editorial writer at the Orange County Register at the time, and let me know that the council was meeting behind closed doors to discuss the massive pension boost. Other Republicans appeared to back the deal and the establishment was furious at Nelson for blowing the whistle. His critics claimed, incorrectly, that he violated the state’s open meetings law for telling a reporter about the closed-door negotiations. Actually, the Brown Act requires cities to tell the public the general subject of the discussions, which is all that Nelson did.

So the unions have come out blazing. So far, they have spent more than $900,000 in a barrage of negative hit pieces against Nelson and favorable pieces about their hand-picked candidate, a malleable Anaheim City Councilman named Harry Sidhu who has already promised to drop the county’s lawsuit against a retroactive pension deal granted to deputies in 2001. Both Nelson and Sidhu signed the Baugh pledge, but Sidhu has sat back and said nothing as unions spend nearly a million bucks (expected to hit $1.2 million by Election Day) on a race that generally draws about a quarter of that level of spending.

The unions see this as an attempt to throw Baugh’s manifesto back in his face and to rebuke a line-in-the-sand anti-union candidate.

Every serious budget person in California knows that the state cannot continue lavishing these pensions on public employees. Gov. Arnold Schwarznegger’s pension adviser, David Crane, gave a special word recently at a Capitol hearing to his fellow Democrats: “One cannot both be a progressive and be opposed to pension reform. The math is irrefutable that the losers from excessive and unfunded pensions are precisely the programs progressive Democrats tend to applaud.”

The Reason Foundation’s new study succinctly captures the depth of California’s public-employee problem. We’re not talking only about ungainly pensions, but exorbitant health-care costs being paid to a class of government workers whose ranks get larger even as the state budget implodes.

But the unions don’t care about the math. You stand up to them and you pay a price. If they win in Orange County, then expect the Baugh manifesto to fade away and expect fewer politicians in California who will stand up to union bullying.