Public pay data show root of budget ills

One of our recurring frustrations is that California policy makers continue to shovel enormous piles of taxpayer cash to address our state’s pressing problems — from homelessness to infrastructure to public schools — and yet we see little real-world progress. The state’s annual total budget approaches $311 billion. That budget is more than double the state budget only a dozen years ago.

“California’s state and local government revenues and spending are 60 percent higher than Texas on a perresident basis,” according to a 2019 report from the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. One of the key reasons for the disparity is compensation. Public employees here — at the state, county and city level — earn pay and benefit packages that average more than $140,000 a year — double what private employees earn.

The Sacramento Bee has just released its new state worker pay database, which details the gross pay earned by the state’s 260,000 state employees and 400,000 university workers. It shows, for instance, some obvious high earners — such as the multimillion-dollar salaries earned by university football coaches and top University of California doctors. But the real issue isn’t a handful of outliers, but the outsized pay scales for mainstream public employees.

A Yahoo news report on the database found that total pay increased 3.2% last year and that the state added 2,000 new workers. We prefer the database put together by Transparent California, which includes the value of the state’s generous benefit packages — and not just gross pay. It also breaks down the pay by categories (such as overtime). The key indicator is not what employees receive in their paycheck, but their total cost to taxpayers.

We urge readers to search the databases to see the eyepopping compensation levels for themselves. As of 2021, Transparent California found that more than 40,000 California retirees were members of the $100,000 pension club — a number that soared 173% in nine years. In another example, the California Policy Center reported that the average total compensation package for firefighters in just one city, Manhattan Beach, was $328,000.

Even the data that shows total compensation including pension benefits — and California offers the most lucrative pension plans in the nation — understates total costs. That’s because unfunded pension liabilities are not included in most tallies. For instance, the California Public Employee’s Retirement System (CALPERS) only had 72% of the funds needed to fulfill its total pension promises as of last June, which means that taxpayers are responsible for any shortfalls. That amounts to a debt of around $4,000 for every Californian.

In 2012, the California Legislature passed a modest pension reform law, spearheaded by Gov. Jerry Brown, but lawmakers haven’t had the fortitude to address the issue since then — even though the pension problem hasn’t gone away and continues to stress local budgets in particular. The courts finally have upheld provisions in that law eliminating some pensionspiking gimmicks. In other words, it’s taken years simply to rein in even the most outrageous benefit costs.

Is it any wonder that California never has enough money? More reasonable compensation packages would help the state stretch its resources. So if you’re wondering why so little gets done despite the size of our tax burden and budget, peruse these databases for insight.