Sue Greenwald is a Davis City Council member.
Re “Davis mayor hits road after council spat” (Our Region, Jan. 31): At a recent Davis City Council meeting, I overreacted when our mayor incorrectly denied that I had tried to reform an unusual and expensive employee benefit. For doing so, I profoundly apologize.
Since 2005, I have been waging a frustrating, losing battle to keep the city’s labor costs from outstripping revenues, and to deal with the city’s unfunded health and pension liabilities. My husband is a public employee, and so was my father. I believe public employees deserve to be fairly compensated. But unless reasonable reform is taken, the system will collapse.
Benefits in Davis exceed those of comparable state and university workers, and our firefighter costs are unsustainable. I had fought to moderate our previous contract with firefighters that raised salaries by 36 percent over four years, resulting in total compensation costs exceeding $140,000 plus overtime for every firefighter, except a few new recruits.
I fought a losing battle against enhanced early retirement benefits for our non-public-safety workers, warning that this benefit was unsustainable and irreversible, and would ultimately result in a two-tiered system where younger workers would receive lower benefits in order to fund higher benefits of current workers.
As early as 2004, I explained that our budget was being balanced by virtue of large property tax revenue increases that could not continue.
Today, we face a looming budget crisis. Yet our recent management contract requires few furlough days, and the city has not undertaken necessary structural reforms. For example, the city allows each employee to take home an additional $17,800 every year if he or she has a spouse with health insurance, although slightly less for firefighters. This “cash-out” costs the city about $4 million annually.
I proposed reducing this unusual and expensive provision by 75 percent, putting the savings into a fund to pay down our extraordinarily high unfunded retiree health liability, which will hit home in about eight years. I even lost this battle. After contemplation, I realized I had not been angry because my colleague wrongly claimed that I had not tried to lower the $17,800-per-year health insurance cash-out provision. In hindsight, I should not have raised the topic that evening, and I was overly harsh. I sincerely apologize to her.
I realize that I was not really reacting to what she said; rather I was expressing general frustration arising from years of fighting unwise decisions that have led to our current fiscal plight.