Source: Union Tribune
No higher pensions for ex-school officials
By Chris Moran
STAFF WRITER
April 27, 2006
SAN YSIDRO – The $15,000 raises two San Ysidro school administrators got just weeks before their retirement in 2002 do not qualify them for higher publicly funded pensions, an administrative law judge has ruled.
The judge agreed with retirement system auditors who found that the San Ysidro school board gave the raises to boost the pensions of former assistant superintendents Christine Aranda and Alice De La Torre. That is an illegal practice known as spiking.
Aranda and De La Torre requested a hearing, which was in September, to challenge the audit by the California State Teachers' Retirement System. The judge issued a decision this month, and the ruling must go to the CalSTRS board for approval. That probably will happen in June, an agency spokeswoman said.
In 2004, CalSTRS put a stop to the higher retirement payments and put Aranda and De La Torre on installment plans to repay the surplus pension money they had received. Neither they nor the San Ysidro School District face additional sanctions.
CalSTRS did not dispute the legality of the raises. It found only that those raises should not be used in calculating retirement benefits.
De La Torre and Aranda both said they had not yet decided whether to continue contesting the issue.
The case began in June 2002. It was then that the board increased the salaries of Aranda and De La Torre from $104,494 to $120,000 a year, retroactive to the previous July.
The San Ysidro district gave CalSTRS two reasons for the raises: to recognize Aranda and De La Torre's increased workload under an inexperienced superintendent and to persuade them not to retire.
The incentive didn't work. De La Torre retired three weeks after the raise and Aranda retired six weeks after the board's action. Their replacements were given $106,000 salaries.
The board fired Superintendent Jose Torres the same day it gave the raises to Aranda and De La Torre.
The state teachers' retirement fund accrues through contributions from employees, school districts, the state general fund and investment earnings.
Each retiree's age, years of employment and highest salary figures into the retirement benefits. CalSTRS calculated that the last-minute raises added $1,189 to De La Torre's monthly pension check and $869 to Aranda's, an increase that was estimated to add up to nearly $300,000 combined over their lifetimes.
In her proposed decision, Administrative Law Judge Vallera Johnson recapped that Aranda and De La Torre took on extra work, such as teacher union negotiations, a task generally handled by the superintendent.
The current San Ysidro board spent $72,000 in legal fees on the case before dropping its opposition to the CalSTRS findings. Aranda and De La Torre then hired their own attorney to represent them in a hearing in September.
Both are still active in South County, Aranda as a trustee on the board of Southwestern College and De La Torre with several volunteer organizations.
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