Extra-lucrative plans of ex-superintendent, some others could haunt the district.

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Sac City to revisit pensions
Extra-lucrative plans of ex-superintendent, some others could haunt the district.
By Dorothy Korber -- Bee Staff Writer
Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Sunday, September 14, 2003

The Sacramento City Unified School District faces serious questions about the legitimacy and propriety of a little-known retirement system that nearly tripled the pension of the district's top administrator and sweetens the benefits for 100 other employees.
Under the 3-year-old system, Superintendent Jim Sweeney was able to retire in June with an estimated pension of nearly $120,000 a year, according to calculations The Bee made based on public records. Under Sweeney's previous retirement plan, the California State Teachers' Retirement System, he would have received $43,200 a year, the calculations show.

Former chief financial officer Laura Bruno was the architect of the new system known as CASA -- the California Administrative Services Authority. After serving 30 months under its provisions, she earned an estimated annual pension of more than $48,000 from CASA, The Bee found.

Bruno, who retired Dec. 31 at age 56, receives another $93,882 a year from her pension under the California Public Employees' Retirement System. Before coming to the Sacramento district in 1994, she worked as a financial consultant for the state Department of Education.

CASA declined to provide the actual pension amounts for specific individuals. The Bee based its estimates on the employee's highest salary, age at retirement, and years with the Sacramento district or CASA.

Sweeney and Bruno say the new pension plan is legal, financially sound, and costs the district no more than the two major state-administered retirement systems, CalPERS and CalSTRS.

"I know damn well I didn't do anything wrong," said Sweeney, 65. "The average person is trying to maximize their income and their retirement within the context of the law and what's right and fair. I want to get my fair share of income in my retirement for myself and for my family. I don't apologize for doing that."

Sacramento City Unified board members unanimously approved the new plan in April 2000, and in ensuing months also voted unanimously for additional pension enhancements for Sweeney, Bruno and district general counsel Martin Fine. They defend the benefits as well-deserved.

In addition, the improvements allow the district to attract and keep top administrators, said board member Manny Hernandez.

"As an urban district, we have to be competitive," Hernandez said. "Trust me -- go to any school and see the terrific pressure administrators work under. If we can enhance an administrator and keep him, it's worth it.

"As for Jim Sweeney, before 1996, we had one superintendent a year. Jim stayed on the job. But for this man, we wouldn't have been able to move this entire district ahead."

But some community members challenge the CASA arrangement as a special deal crafted by and for top management. District labor unions ask why their rank-and-file members can't get similar benefits. And, in a tough letter to the school district on July 30, CalPERS disputes the legality of the whole setup.

If CalPERS' contention is borne out, the district could owe CalPERS and Social Security for years of back payments for all 100 employees.

"I want the Sacramento district to know that this could be a real problem for them," the letter's author, Kenneth W. Marzion, chief of the CalPERS employer services division, said in an interview.

Reginald Fair, who heads a coalition of community and labor groups critical of CASA, sees other problems. Fair, a Sacramento lobbyist specializing in education issues, also is on the district's African American Advisory Council. He scratches his head at the notion that administrators could get significantly higher retirement benefits and it won't cost anyone anything.

"When you have an enhanced retirement benefit like this, someone is paying the bill," Fair said. "The employees aren't paying a nickel more. We contend that the people paying the bill are the taxpayers. And the school board -- who are the taxpayers' representatives -- have been asleep at the wheel on this issue."

President Rob Fong and others on the school board say they must depend on the expertise of their staff when it comes to the complexities of retirement rules.

"Being the board president doesn't mean I'm up on pension laws," said Fong. "We kind of depend on our staff to let us know that things are OK. Obviously, if we've done something that we shouldn't have done, then we'll fix it."

Fong noted that the district's interim superintendent, Chuck McCully, is hiring outside auditors to investigate CASA's finances and legal standing. McCully, who is not a CASA participant, said he will recommend an auditor to the board at its meeting Monday.

He said that questions Fair's group has raised, as well as the CalPERS letter, prompted his decision.

"I feel the district has a responsibility to respond to the serious allegations that have been made," McCully said.

CASA was born on July 1, 2000, with Bruno and Sweeney among its charter members. Bruno, the district's chief financial officer at the time, had pitched the idea to the school board that spring. She said she based her proposal on a similar arrangement in the Long Beach Unified School District that has been in place several years.

Marzion said CalPERS is aware of a half-dozen similar joint authorities in the state and has decided to tackle the situation first in the Sacramento district.

CASA's basic premise is this:

The school board creates a government body known as a joint powers authority, CASA, which declares that it will not participate in Social Security. As a body of government, the authority is entitled to make that declaration.

In general, joint powers authorities allow local governments to work together to share resources and expenses. In this case, Sacramento City Unified joined with the Yolo County Office of Education to create CASA. About a dozen Yolo administrators also are CASA participants.

To leave CalPERS, where paying into Social Security is mandatory, the workers have to be employed by CASA. They accomplish this by taking unpaid leaves of absence from the district and going to work for CASA, with the same title, responsibilities and pay. The district then contracts with CASA for those staffers.

This is a point challenged by the CalPERS letter, which contends that these people are still district employees: "The mere act of making a choice between two different retirement options would not suffice to make CASA the 'employer.' "

The key to CASA is its exemption from Social Security.

Social Security requires a 6.2 percent contribution from both the employer and the employee. CASA takes the district's 6.2 percent and plows it into its own plan, enriching the retirement benefits for participants.

CASA employees, no longer paying Social Security, see an immediate boost to their take-home pay. (They may still be eligible for Social Security benefits based on previous contributions.)

And that, Bruno told the board, is how everybody wins. The district's contribution to CASA is no larger than it was under CalPERS -- 19.22 percent of the employee's salary. The employees' pensions and paychecks are bigger. And, since CASA worked out a reciprocal deal with CalPERS, the employees' years of service march on uninterrupted.

"It's not rocket science," Bruno said in a recent interview.

But things were to get more complicated.

For starters, Sweeney was never in CalPERS. He was in the teachers' system, CalSTRS, which did not require that he pay into Social Security. So there was no net gain in his switching to CASA. An exception was made for the superintendent, Bruno said, and CASA made up the difference.

Then, days before CASA was launched, Sweeney came to the Sacramento school board with another recommendation, according to board documents. This time there were three beneficiaries: Sweeney, Bruno and general counsel Fine.

Sweeney asked that their mileage allowances and expenses be folded into their salaries, a practice not permitted under CalPERS. And he wanted the board to grant each of them 10 additional years of service credit for their pension calculations.

Pension formulas have three basic ingredients: age at retirement, salary and years of service. CASA already provided better benefits based on age than either CalPERS or the teachers' system. The adjustments Sweeney sought boosted the other two components.

The money to cover the enhancements comes from CASA's general pool of contributions and investment income, Bruno said in an interview.

"The CASA system had sufficient resources to be able to cover that with no additional cost to the district," Bruno said. "I think it's important to remember that the contract officers do have their own packages. All of our contracts were subject to immediate termination -- we had no job security. This was a way of compensating us."

The school board -- told again that the fledgling CASA would absorb the costs -- agreed to the extra 10 years and the changes to mileage and expenses. Board President Fong said it was seen as way to reward the three without increasing the dollars the district paid them.

Sweeney said he saw nothing unusual in the idea.

"As I remember it," Sweeney said, "the feeling was that the 10 extra years was both an incentive and a reward for a job well done. Other boards sometimes buy years to reward their superintendents. CASA paid whatever the increase was -- not a nickel of district funds were involved."

State pension experts say that granting 10 years of service at no cost to the employee is extraordinary for any public servant.

"It would take an act of the Legislature to give away 10 years of credit in one of the state retirement systems," said Clem Miller, consultant to the Assembly Committee on Public Employees, Retirement and Social Security. "That is quite an unusual perk."

When Sweeney retired, the boost more than doubled his total years of service credit with the district, from nine to 19. That accounts for most of the difference between his pension as a CASA employee and what he would have gotten if he had stayed in the teachers' retirement system, The Bee's calculations show.

Under the teachers' plan, with nine actual years served, Sweeney's monthly entitlement would have been around $3,600. Under CASA, with 19 years' credit, Sweeney retired June 30 with an estimated monthly pension of $9,974.

Bruno contends that employer and employee contributions to CASA will be enough to cover its pension payouts. But, for now, most of CASA's resources stem not from contributions but from money it borrowed.

In November 2001, Bruno brought another proposal to the board: authorize the financing of $6.5 million through pension obligation bonds.

"In order to give new enrollees increased confidence in the financial strength of the plan," she wrote in a memo to the board, "staff recommends that CASA, in conjunction with the district, issue bonds to fund part of the actuarial liability of the new retirement plan."

In a unanimous vote on its consent calendar of Dec. 3, 2001, the school board approved the bond.

This summer, two weeks before he retired, Sweeney came to the board with a request for another enhancement. On June 23, the school board voted to hike his salary by $42,838 -- 21 percent -- by folding 47 days of unused vacation into his annual pay.

The unanimous vote was taken in secret and never reported publicly, a violation of state open-meeting laws, according to attorney Terry Francke of the California First Amendment Coalition.

Fong said the violation was unintentional. The board will vote publicly on the question Monday.

The aim of the June action was to increase Sweeney's salary in his final year from $201,000 to $244,000 -- and thereby increase his lifelong retirement benefit proportionately.

Such an act is called pension spiking. And while legal in some arenas, it is barred by state law in both CalPERS and the teachers' retirement system. The objection is that the retirement plan has to shoulder this additional cost -- for which it hadn't planned -- while the employer and the employee get a free ride.

"The board's sentiment was, 'Here's a man who worked very hard and never asked for a buyout," Fong recalled. "We were told it wouldn't make any difference to the district. There was no deep analysis of what this meant."

After Sweeney retired, Bruno informed the district that this last-minute hike was pointless, for it pushed his annual compensation above the $200,000 federal limit for pension calculation. Bruno was informing them under the auspices of her new role: executive director of CASA, an unpaid position.

Told of the problem, Sweeney decided to cash out his vacation pay instead of adding it to his salary. "To me it's moot -- I didn't do it," Sweeney said.

But Bruno did. In her final 12 months with the district, she converted her vacation to salary, according to district payroll records. The change, approved by CASA's three-member appointed board, bumped up her final year's pay by $27,000, to $189,717.

This was not pension spiking, she contends, since she converted the vacation to salary over two fiscal years.

Since CASA and CalPERS have a reciprocal agreement, Bruno's final salary under CASA also is used to calculate her much larger CalPERS pension.

That particular arrangement is a selling point that CASA uses to attract district employees away from the security of CalPERS.

But CalPERS will not simply accept the "enhanced" CASA pay rate without scrutiny, according to Marzion, the CalPERS employer services chief.

Asked about including vacation and mileage into final compensation, Marzion said: "We would not include those things in the calculation of any retirement benefit accrued under CalPERS."

The school district would be responsible for the difference, Marzion said.

His letter to the district contained another bombshell. It states that CASA employees should not be exempt from Social Security: "If CASA is not a valid joint powers authority, they would owe Social Security the amount they are in arrears."

Bruno contends that CASA is legally valid.

"There are numerous organizations that have opted out of Social Security," Bruno said. "As for the CalPERS letter, we'll work through this. It will just take a little time. There are too many precedents out there for this to be a problem for us."

Sweeney views Marzion's letter as the saber rattling of a pension competitor. He said CalPERS is concerned that CASA is the beginning of a trend away from the big state system.

"When I saw that thing, I didn't know what to make of it," he said of the letter. "I asked myself, 'Is CalPERS in a sense competing?' The answer was yes. That made me wary. It isn't an agency that is neutral or regulatory. We've got somebody competing with us who is raising all these issues."

Fair and his community/labor coalition have raised their own slew of questions:

They wonder about accountability at CASA, with its appointed three-member board of directors. They challenge CASA's recent foray into the consulting business, in which it offers services, for a fee, to charter schools. They worry that the district will be on the hook financially if CASA is found to be invalid.

Sweeney said his understanding is that the district would not be liable.

"My take on that is no," Sweeney said, "and I've been told that by people I trust. I asked the same question. Let's say -- worst case scenario -- if CASA went belly-up, it would not come back on the district. Laura Bruno certainly said not."

But, in the 2001 memo on the pension bond, Bruno gave the school board a different answer. She posed the question herself: What are the risks to the district?

She wrote: "Since the district, under its contract with CASA, is ultimately responsible for paying all the costs associated with the personnel it contracts for, the district is ultimately obligated on the bonds."

And if payouts exceed projections?

"In that case," she wrote, "the district would have to pay more money from its general fund for pension benefits than was anticipated."

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