Bob Emery: Don’t blame the pensioners for budget mess

By Bob Emery

Remember when nurses, teachers, firefighters, police and city employees crashed the economy and took billions in bonuses and government bailouts?

No? Neither do I. But you wouldn’t know it to look at the financial and editorial pages of local and national newspapers. “Police, fire unions doomed San Bernardino,” shouts a recent editorial in the U-T.

The City of San Diego underfunded their pension obligation for years and who gets blamed for it? The pensioners, those who worked for 30 or 40 years and expected a decent retirement. In reality, as early as 1993, the San Diego city manager and City Council began taking “holidays” from their required pension contributions and at the same time, increased retiree benefits, not a prudent move. Yes, workers asked for and received pension increases and health benefits that the city couldn’t afford and the city should have said no, but they didn’t.

My point is this: If Wall Street and our biggest financial institutions mess up royally and cause the stock markets to fail, in turn causing investment pools such as retirement systems to be underfunded, don’t blame the pensioners or the employees. They negotiated their benefits in good faith and it was the state legislators, city councils and boards of supervisors that said yes to the requests even when they should have said no.

To be fair, I supped at the public trough my entire career. I was a bloated, fat-cat middle school teacher for 36 years lollygagging around daily with 180 or so 12- and 13-year-olds. I’m so ashamed. For all those years I threw 8 percent of my monthly salary along with my employer’s contribution down a rat-hole called the State Teachers Retirement System. Silly me. How was I to know that I was causing the financial collapse of our nation?

Since when did the greed and incompetence of Wall Street and our largest financial institution and the strait-jacketed inability of our state and national governments to govern become the fault of the working middle class? Our only real culpability is continuing to re-elect these jerks. Congress is a millionaire’s club which is at the beck and call of, you guessed it, the billionaire’s club on Wall Street.

On a sadder, but a considerably more upbeat theme, I note the passing of two San Diegans over the past couple of weeks who contributed greatly to science, women’s status and our quality of life.

First, the premature death of former astronaut-teacher Sally Ride. At only 61, Ride was taken from us way too soon. She dedicated her post-astronaut life to inspiring young girls to go into the sciences and otherwise continue their education. President Barack Obama noted that “Sally’s life showed us that there are no limits to what we can achieve and I have no doubt that her legacy will endure for years to come.”

Another loss that came all too early was the untimely death of philanthropist Dennis Avery, the heir to the Avery Label fortune. This death is especially personal for me as I just met Dennis for the first time a couple of months ago at the Visitors Center in Anza Borrego Desert State Park. His loss also hits home as we were almost exactly the same age, both being born in L.A. in the winter of 1940. Dennis Avery was an attorney in his own right working at one time for the City of San Diego and other agencies, but he is revered as a booster for the small town of Borrego Springs where he lived much of the time and raised his children. He contributed the lights on the high school football field, built the Boys and Girls Club skate park, and a Little League park, purchased over 3,000 acres of property to save it from development, supported the chamber of commerce, amid many other local activities. Most recently he is remembered for his commissioning of over 130 larger-than-life sculptures of prehistoric animals that once roamed the Borrego Springs area. Borrego Springs and San Diego will miss Dennis Avery.