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Re: Separation Needed, Mr. Moorlach, shouldn’t you be worried about Orange County’s problems instead of butting into ours?
I find it absurd that you have the audacity to promote the separation of the city attorney from the pension system by using Orange County as an example.
From the newspaper on September 11, 2005 Orange County:
“More than a decade after filing for municipal bankruptcy, another financial crisis is unfolding. County supervisors recently learned that their employee pension fund is $2.3 billion short of what officials say is needed to pay future retirement benefits. Some supervisors were stunned by the news, but critics say they shouldn’t have been. They say the Board of Supervisors triggered the pension crunch by approving overly generous benefit increases twice in recent years.
Orange County Treasurer-Tax Collector John Moorlach opposed the pension increases, largely because they applied to current employees as well as future workers. “Overnight, for example, the public safety workers here got a 50 percent increase in their pensions,” Moorlach said. “It was very frustrating.”
Maybe if you had a city attorney like our Duly Elected Mr. Aguirre, you would not have been so frustrated.
One other thing, have you ever read the California Constitution? If not, maybe you should familiarize yourself with Cal Const, Art XVI § 17 (b) which says the following
“The members of the retirement board of a public pension or retirement system shall discharge their duties with respect to the system solely in the interest of, and for the exclusive purposes of providing benefits to, participants and their beneficiaries, minimizing employer contributions thereto and defraying reasonable expenses of administering the system. A retirement board’s duty to its participants and their beneficiaries shall take precedence over any other duty.”
That is why the city attorney has a dual role as the attorney for both the employer and the retiree. It is the city attorney’s duty to make sure both sides uphold our State Constitution.