Source: Union Tribune
Chris Reed
Monday, March 15, 2010
I've been forwarded materials in recent weeks that suggest that Del Mar Union School District Superintendent Sharon McClain is pressuring her school board members to go along with a huge spike in her pension by reclassifying the $16k she gets annually for retirement contributions as pay.
The California State Teachers Retirement System frowns on this sort of late-career shenanigans and has apparently told the district its decision to provide the spike last June was not OK -- but McClain keeps pushing the board to pursue the matter.
My e-mails to board President Comischell Rodriguez have yielded bland or misleading responses. Is she going to go along with McClain's wish that the district push to get CalSTRS to change its mind? Or will she try to defy CalSTRS and deem McClain's pension to be much higher?
Will she OK using school district-paid attorneys to try to get CalSTRS to change its mind?
Keep in mind that McClain's pension is already going to be well north of six figures. And CalSTRS is woefully underfunded with about $40 billion less in its portfolio then what it is obligated to pay out. This looks like an ugly, inappropriate, costly power play to me.
So what will Rodriguez and the rest of the board do?
We'll see.
But remember what happened in San Ysidro. This is from the April 27, 2006, U-T:
Judge rejects higher pensions for 2 former school officials
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. ...
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. ...
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 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.
If McClain wants to pursue this with CalSTRS, she shoud do it on her own dime.
As for Del Mar school board members, it's time they grew spines.
More information:
|