CA Public Pensions Law Blog

On June 5, 2017, the California Court of Appeal published DiCarlo v. County of Monterey, holding that employees’ stipends that depended on both longevity and performance were properly excluded from the calculation of public pension benefits. The Court of Appeal ruled that although the California Code of Regulations separately lists bonus pay and longevity pay as special compensation to be included in pension calculations, it does not list incentive pay that combines bonus pay and longevity pay. Therefore, the stipends at issue did not need to be reported to CalPERS or included in CalPERS’ calculation of retirement benefit. For a more detailed analysis of this case.

In response to CalPERS’ recent and unprecedented decisions to reduce benefits for retirees from several public agencies that failed to make their required contributions to CalPERS, California Assembly member Freddie Rodriguez (D) and California Senator Richard Pan (D) have scheduled an informational hearing on the subject of “CalPERS Contracting with Participating Employers (Cities, Towns ...

On May 28, in one of his final articles after 33 years and 9,000 columns at the Sacramento Bee, state political columnist Dan Walters opined in “Growing Retirement Costs Are Hitting New State Budget Hard” that although the 2017-18 budget proposed by Governor Jerry Brown references the large impact of pension liabilities, it still minimizes this impact.

Walters summarized how the proposed budget ...