The State Worker

In a letter to members this afternoon, SEIU Local 1000 officials said that they are preparing to negotiate with Gov. Jerry Brown's administration early next month, spurred by his proposal to put state workers on a 4/9.5 workweek that would cut their hours and pay by 5 percent.

The chairs of Local 1000's nine bargaining units said that whatever concessions they negotiate will be put in a "side letter" agreement. That would avoid reopening the local's contracts.

Ahead of that, union officials are soliciting savings ideas to offer as alternatives to Brown's furloughs. Next week the local will conduct an online survey of members.

The union's bargaining team will review all of that information ahead of negotiations scheduled to start June 9. Whatever agreement is reached at the table will go to the rank and file for a ratification vote.

Here's the union's rationale for bargaining cuts:

"As the elected leaders of all nine bargaining units within Local 1000, we agreed that it's better to be aggressive participants in the effort to find solutions to achieve savings. We intend to be part of the action, not acted upon.

"We could have said 'no,' and demanded that the governor honor our contract. By staying engaged, we minimize the potential for a huge number of layoffs and even deeper cuts in vital services, like education and the programs that serve California's most needy."

Here's the entire letter:

The Senate Governance and Finance and the Senate Governmental Organization committees are meeting this morning to gather information on Gov. Jerry Brown's proposal to reorganize state government.

Click here for the live video webcast on Cal Channel. The session started at 10:10 a.m. This link opens an audio feed of the session.

The California Channel also archives video.

The bipartisan Little Hoover Commission today voted 7-0 to endorse Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to reorganize state government.

The proposal calls for replacing five agencies with three, shuffling or eliminating some or all of the functions of several commissions and boards within the executive branch and folding the work of several departments into new or existing organizations. For more details and documents about the particulars, click here.

State law requires that the commission advise the Legislature on gubernatorial government reorganization initiatives. Either the Assembly or the Senate can block the proposal by majority-vote resolution within 60 days of the governor delivering the plan to lawmakers.

Otherwise, the reorganization becomes effective on the 61st day, in this case July 1. It would become operative one year later. There's no indication that there's significant opposition to Brown's plan.

Click here for more information on the Little Hoover Commission's website.

PHOTO: Stuart Drown, executive director of the Little Hoover Commission speaks at a 2011 legislative hearing. / Sacramento Bee file, Hector Amezcua.

Why not just extend the personal leave program?

It's a question that we've heard often in the last week as we sifted through emails from several hundred state workers reacting to Gov. Jerry Brown's 4/9.5 furlough plan to cut their pay by 5 percent through a 2-hours-per-week furlough.

Most of the calls, comments and emails about the policy fall into one of four groups: workers who would love the three-day weekends, workers who think the policy is a betrayal of their contracts, those who hate losing the pay and workers who think the switch would harm state functions.

(As we reported earlier, the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office has some issues with Brown's workweek proposal.)

Then there's a fifth camp asking, why not simply return to giving state workers a floating unpaid day off each month? Departments already know how to manage it because of furloughs and the so-called "personal leave program" that was a provision in most of the latest union contracts.

So what do you think?

The Bee's state pay database guru Phillip Reese has run the numbers on what Gov. Jerry Brown's four-day, 9.5-hours-per-day workweek would do to the Sacramento region's economy.

The annual impact: $230 million in wages taken out of circulation.

Click here to read the entire story.

What does Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to restructure the state workweek mean for state workers and the public?

Is it a good idea or a bad idea? Will it really happen? What about other aspects of his plan to cut costs, like reducing outsourced work and eliminating hiring of retired annuitants?

Join us here at noon today for an hour of your questions and comments during what is sure to be a lively online chat about Brown's version of furloughs. You can even sign up for an email reminder at sacbee.com/live.

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, met with reporters today and talked about Gov. Jerry Brown's proposal to furlough state workers two hours per week.

Brown's plan also lengthens the state workday to 9.5 hours and shortens the workweek to four days. The changes would reduce employees' hours and pay by 5 percent and save the general fund some $401 million ($839 million all funds).

On cooperation between the unions and the governor to come up with a plan:

Just look at the experience in the Schwarzenegger years. ... When they tried to do it unilaterally, what was the end result? Lawsuits, a lot of uncertainty. The better and best way to accomplish the needed savings is to work with the people affected, and that's already going on."

On SEIU Local 1000's position:

"It would be one thing if SEIU Local 1000 was saying hell no and fighting the governor, but they're not doing that. They're actually appreciating the fact that the administration has reached out to them and that they are being brought in."

On the impact to his district and his assessment of the governor's moves:

"It's certainly hard on a lot of my constituents, The process by which the administration is trying to get to that goal, the money goal, I think has been very constructive so far."

On how the issue will play for the November election:

"You want to go into November with as much solidarity as possible."

PHOTO: Darrell Steinberg / 2011 Sacramento Bee file, Hector Amezcua

As our story in today's Bee notes, it's not clear whether rank-and-file state workers will be able to vote on any scheduling changes or other concessions that their representatives bargain to reach the payroll savings target in Gov. Jerry Brown's budget proposal.

Brown wants unions to take a 5-percent pay reduction with a commensurate cut in work hours each month to trim $401 million from the general fund's employee costs and $839 million from all funds in fiscal 2012-13. The governor's plan includes putting most employees on a 4-day, 9.5 hours-per-day workweek.

State law doesn't require a membership vote if a union reaches a side agreement with Brown. The associations' various bylaws, practices and processes determine whether they would issue ballots. Some union leaders also could seek guidance by surveying their members without a formal vote.

State employees would work longer shifts but fewer of them under the revised budget plan proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown this morning, saving the government more than $800 million.

Brown's budget envisions putting a four-day, 38-hour workweek for "the majority of state employees." If broken into four equal shifts, that translates into four 9.5-hour workdays and a reduction of hours and pay of eight hours over four weeks.

Brown's plan doesn't spare prisons or state hospitals: "The Administration will pursue commensurate reductions in work hours and pay for employees of entities that operate 24 hour a day, 7 days a week when implementation of the four-day workweek is not feasible."

The plan also cuts the state's operating costs by cutting energy usage at state-occupied buildings.

In sum, the workweek reconfiguration plan would save an estimated $839.1 million in fiscal 2012-13. Of that, $401.7 million would be savings for the general fund, which Brown says is confronting a $16 billion deficit.

The budget plan also anticipates more savings through cutting outside contracts, particularly in information technology services, eliminating "non essential" hiring of retired annuitants and cutting 11,000 state positions on top of the 15,000 eliminated in the 2011-12 budget.

PHOTO: Gov. Jerry Brown / Sacramento Bee file

From our sister blog, Capitol Alert:

Just how bad will it be?

Gov. Jerry Brown is releasing his revised budget in Sacramento at 10 a.m., and with his deficit estimate now at $16 billion, nobody thinks it'll be easy on the eyes. As Kevin Yamamura reported Sunday, "No sector that relies on state funding is likely to escape deeper cuts. Brown has already told state worker unions to expect at least a 5 percent compensation reduction."

Brown's morning news conference will be streamed live on the California Channel's website. The revised budget itself will posted online shortly after 10 a.m. at this link. Afterward, the governor will head to Los Angeles for a second news conference at 2 p.m. Come back to Capitol Alert later today for details and reactions from legislators and others.

May Lee, 91, hired on with the state's Department of Finance in 1943. Today, she continues to crunch numbers as a volunteer and mentor at the Department of General Services.

DGS recently produced a video about Lee's life and career, which DGS executive Joe Mugartegui puts in perspective: "She was our computer before we had computers."

From Dan Walters at our sister blog, Capitol Alert:

California's state and local government pension funds saw a 12.4 percent increase in their assets during the 2010 fiscal year, according to a new Census Bureau report, markedly higher than the national pension fund increase.

Click here for the rest of Dan's post. A spreadsheet with some of the pension data is posted below:

Editor's note, April 24, 10:35 a.m.: This post, orginally published on Monday, now includes a comment from the California Correctional Peace Officers' Association.

A plan rolled out today to overhaul the state's penal system includes a big change to how prisons are staffed.

"The Future of California Corrections: A Blueprint to Save Billions of Dollars, End Federal Court Oversight and Improve the Prison System" lays out a plan to centralize and standardize staffing instead of leaving such decisions to each prison as they are now.

The shift is part of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation's effort to slash its costs by $1 billion and eliminate 5,500 positions in 2012-13.

JeVaughn Baker, spokesman for the 29,000-member California Correctional Peace Officers Association, which represents roughly 29,000 prison officers, said the union is evaluating the proposal.

"The total implications of CDCR's staffing plan is yet to be determined but we will continue to thoroughly evaluate the proposal," Baker said in an e-mail. "If the plan is successful at ensuring safe operations inside the institution and our potential concerns are addressed, there may be an opportunity for collaboration with the state in the endeavor."

Until now, a prison's management decided how to allocate staff based on how many inmates a facility housed. California's budget crises forced difficult and disparate decisions.

Some prisons cut correctional officers and other custody staff, which "led to situations at some institutions where general population inmates are no longer let out of their cells due to insufficient custody personnel being available to maintain safe and secure prisons," the CDCR report says.

Others preserved custody jobs and cut support staff. But many of those jobs are vital to keeping facilities up and running and aren't tied to how many inmates a prison is holding: "Further population-driven reductions from plant operations," CDCR says, "would leave the prisons with insufficient staff to maintain the physical plant of the facility."

Now, with the prison population shrinking, the state has a chance to standardize staffing and gain efficiencies from it. A "team of correctional experts" developed the standards for most of the prisons that will be running in 2013-14 when the new staffing plan is supposed to take hold, the report says. Some older institutions still need to be evaluated.

California State Prison, Sacramento, for example, will shed about 66 custody positions and add about 26 health care jobs. In sum, the facility will lose about 29 positions in 2012-13.

RELATED LINKS
Californians to Watch: Matthew Cate directs prison downsizing
The Future of California Corrections (executive summary)
The Future of California Corrections (full report)
Institution Profiles (details the staffing changes at each facility)
Court-ordered targets for California inmate population reduction (includes weekly census)

Hundreds of state jobs that were on the chopping block have been spared, according to an e-mail sent to State Compensation Insurance Fund employees this morning.

State Fund President and CEO Tom Rowe's message to staff said that 1,300 workers have left since last fall's announcement that the quasi-public agency would shed between 1,500 and 1,800 jobs.

"The number of positions that remain in the restructure plan is now small enough that we have decided to cancel the layoff," Rowe wrote in the e-mail that went out this morning.

The Little Hoover Commission has scheduled three days of hearings to consider Gov. Jerry Brown's government overhaul proposal starting Monday, 9 a.m. in the Employment Development Department Auditorium at 722 Capitol Mall.

The nonpartisan commission has until the end of this month to deliver its recommendations about the government reorganization plan to the Legislature. The plan goes into effect unless a majority in either the Assembly or the Senate reject it within 60 days of receiving the commission's report.

Brown's plan shuffles departments, eliminates agencies and consolidates others. The governor says the plan would streamline government and save money.

RELATED POSTS:
Jerry Brown starts clock on sweeping government overhaul
The State Worker: Will Jerry Brown's reorg plan fix California's bugs?
Column Extra: More about reorganizing California government

120419 LHC Press_Release_4-23-12

We can never get everything we learn into a news story. "From the notebook" posts give you some of the extra details behind the news.

Our report in today's Bee looks at how many first-time state workers the state has hired during Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown's return to the executive branch. We also compare those figures with how many workers the state hired during GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's final year.

What follows are hiring tallies by job class and department from data provided to us by the State Controller's Office. The numbers show how many individuals were hired from January 2011 through last February, two more months than the hiring tables published with today's report:

With just 400 to 450 words for our weekly State Worker column, most of what we learn each week never sees print. Column Extras give you some of the notes, the quotes and the observations that inform what's published.

Our column in today's fiber/cyber Bee examines the notion that government has "customers." Click here to view the section of the 2004 California Performance Review we referenced today, titled "Putting Californians First -- Creating a Customer Service Framework."

Read the column, check out the report and then take our poll:

Workers at the state Board of Equalization's Sacramento headquarters found mold between the building's ninth and 10th floors last month, although this time the discovery didn't displace any staff.

BOE spokesman Jaime Garza said in an email that "the area was immediately closed, the mold was removed, and Hygiene Technologies conducted testing which concluded the air was safe and clean."

Hygiene Technologies is the company contracted by the boardto handle air quality tests at the 24-story building at 450 N St.

While conducting some unrelated repairs on the building on Mar. 24, DGS staff and Hygiene Technologies employees came across the mold in a space above an empty storage area on the ninth floor. The company removed the mold last weekend.

The BOE has a long history of problems that have cost the state millions to repair and clean up, including water pipe leaks, mold, malfunctioning elevators and faulty windows. Earlier this year a glass panel fell eight floors and shattered on the sidewalk after it popped loose from the east side of the building. No one was injured.

Correction, 5:54 p.m.: An earlier version of this post incorrectly said that Hygiene Technologies was contracted by the Department of General Services.

PHOTO: The Board of Equalization headquarters / 2005 Sacramento Bee file, Jay Mather

Are state workers dragging down state budgets around the nation? Or have public employees and their compensation packages become convenient political scapegoats?

A year ago the PBS news show "Need to Know" took on what it calls "one of the most contentious arguments in the news today." We ran across the report this morning while surveying state worker news. Although the item ran on March 11, 2011, the topic remains relevant today.

Watch Union Salaries and State Budgets on PBS. See more from Need to Know.

Savings Plus, the non-CalPERS program that makes 401(k) and 457 retirement savings accounts available to most state workers, has announced its Sacramento front office is moving to a temporary location.

The office closing on 15th Street has been leased by the state for 15 years. Officials decided to close it to save costs. The program's public counter, which is the point of personal contact with state employees, is moving temporarily to a location on R and 16th streets. Look for the public counter's permanent space to open later this year in the same complex.

Savings Plus has combined assets of $8.2 billion.

Editor's note, 3:15 p.m.: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that the offices of Savings Plus were moving to temporary space. Only the public counter is moving.

Savings Plus is on the Move

A three-month countdown started today on Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to downsize state government.

The administration delivered an eight-page proposal to the Little Hoover Commission that would, among other things, reduce the number of state agencies from 12 to 10, consolidate some departments and eliminate others.

"The state's bureaucracy is a labyrinth of disjointed boards, commissions, agencies and departments," said Brown said in a press release this afternoon. "This common sense plan makes government more efficient, responsive and coordinated and will ultimately save taxpayer dollars."

Brown made the sweeping changes part of his state budget draft in January. Now Little Hoover has 30 days to review the plan and issue recommendations to the Governor and Legislature. The plan goes into effect unless a majority in either the Assembly or the Senate reject it within 60 days of receiving the commission's report.

Click here for the governor's letter to The Little Hoover Commission and summary of the consolidation plan. You can see the reorganization plan delivered to the commission by clicking the link below.

With just 400 to 450 words for our weekly State Worker column, most of what we learn each week never sees print. Column Extras give you some of the notes, the quotes and the observations that inform what's published.

Our column in today's fiber/cyber Bee filters the debate over state workers' wages through Senate Bill 1368, which would cap state pay -- including overtime -- at what the governor earns, about $174,000 per year.

So we asked our state worker pay database guru, Phillip Reese, to find out how many state employees would have been affected last year if SB 1368 had been law, and what job classes dominated that pay strata. We also asked him to look at UC system employees (the latest data we have for them is for 2010) to get a sense of how many of them made more than the governor. SB 1368 wouldn't affect them, though, because the UC system is constitutionally protected, but the bill encourages its leaders to conform to the cap.

Here's Phillip's email answering my questions:

About 2,015 civil service, CSU and legislative workers earned base pay over $174,000 in 2011, state controller's data show. Another 2,560 UC employees earned that much in 2010, according to the most recent data available from the UC system. So about 4,500 total -- a number that almost doubles if you look at total pay, which includes overtime, bonuses, etc. (I know Anderson, in his bill, cited "more than 8,000 workers," which is in line with my numbers if looking at total pay, instead of just base pay.)

By far, the largest job class in this group is physicians, mostly working at UC hospitals, state prisons and state mental health facilities. About 2,100 of the 4,500 are doctors, dentists or psychiatrists. Running far behind, but with more than 200 employees making that much, are judges, senior professors and top administrators at myriad agencies.

RELATED POSTS:
Anderson bill would cap state worker pay at Jerry Brown's salary
Steinberg: state worker pay cap bill 'worth considering'

As reported last week, Senate Bill 1368 by Republican Sen. Joel Anderson, would set the top salary for state workers and officers at the $173,987 earned by the governor.

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, D-Sacramento, has said the pay cap measure is "worth considering."

What do you think?

We never get all of what we learn into a news story, but this blog can give users the data, the notes and the quotes from the notebook that informed what was published.

Our story in today's Bee looks at which state jobs are drawing the most applicants from outside government and why, using data compiled by the State Personnel Board, which administers eligibility examinations for state civil service positions.

Below you'll find the list of all 1,390 jobs for which at least one applicant was deemed eligible when SPB made its first data run for our story on Mar. 2. This is not a help-wanted list, but an accounting of how many people have been deemed eligible for consideration when a job on the list opens.

Want more details? Check out the state's one-stop, everything-you-need-to-know website, www.jobs.ca.gov, where you can put a job title in a search engine and then click through to find out about pay ranges, tests, duties and minimum qualifications.

The state also keeps job eligibility lists totals online. Click here to look up the info, which can be sorted by job class and department. The figures are updated daily.

With just 400 to 450 words for our weekly State Worker column, most of what we learn each week never sees print. Column Extras give you some of the notes, the quotes and the observations that inform what's published.

Our State Worker column in today's Bee examines the dispute between James Ward, who worked as chief dentist at Ironwood State Prison until July 2009, and the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

Ward says he accepted in good faith a permanent position that was illegally voided when the state said the job was really temporary and eventually let him go.

The department says its employees were mistaken when they assured Ward the job was permanent. Returning him to a permanent state job now would bind departments to the erroneous actions of their lowest-level staff and managers, CDCR lawyers have argued.

SPB Judge Jeanne Wolfe heard arguments in the case and issued a decision last September in favor of Ward. As is its prerogative, the board rejected Wolfe's ruling and heard the case for itself last month. We expect a ruling within a few weeks.

Here's Wolfe's decision, which includes many more details about the matter than we could jam into our column:
James Ward v. CDCR

From The Bee's Dale Kasler:

CalPERS today moved toward reducing its investment forecast by a quarter percentage point, a move that would cost the state's general fund $167 million a year.

Click here to read more.

The recommendation goes to a vote of the full board on Wednesday.

The State Worker has received several emails from staff in the five agencies that are paying furlough back wages, all asking the same thing: When will they get their money?

Current and former employees of the Prison Industry Authority, the First 5 California Commission, the California Housing Finance Agency, the California Earthquake Authority and the California State Lottery who lost pay to furloughs are due to get the withheld money. They will not receive interest on the back pay. The payouts won't affect the state's general fund, since it doesn't furnish money to those five agencies.

The State Controller's Office has to cut the checks, so we asked SCO spokesman Jacob Roper when that would happen.

"We are working with other departments to get all the necessary information, and we should have a time frame this week," Roper said in an email this afternoon.

We never get all of what we learn into a news story, but this blog can give users the data, the notes and the quotes from the notebook that informed what was published.

Here are some sources that informed our story on Assemblyman Roger Dickinson's "Public Employees Bill of Rights," specifically its provision to give state rank-and-file employees first crack at state work.

California Government Code Section 19130-19135, which lays out the rules for state outsourcing.

Assembly Bill 1655, the "Public Employees Bill of Rights."

The Bureau of State Audits 2009 report on illegitimate contracting at the Department of Health Care Services and the Department of Public Health.

The Feb. 21 prepared statement on private contracting by Dr. Stuart Bussey, president of the Union of American Physicians and Dentists to the Assembly Budget Subcommittee on Administration.

"The Hidden Branch of Government," SEIU Local 1000's latest installment on state outsourcing costs.

And below we've embedded data pulled from the Department of General Services' State Contract & Procurement Registration System for the first two months of this year.

(For more specific descriptions of specific contracts, click the second tab on the bottom of the spreadsheet and scroll right to the "Item Description" column. What even more? The eight-digit numbers in the far right column conform to the United Nations Standard Products and Services Code. Click here to open a search engine that lets you plug in the numbers to get a description of of the goods or services that the state purchased.)

Lawmakers lit into a California state prisons official Wednesday afternoon for his department's failure to account for its spending -- twice.

Assemblyman Gil Cedillo, D-Los Angeles, called his budget subcommittee to order and then quickly skipped down to the second issue on the agenda, an update on why the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation hasn't produced spending reports that the Legislature demanded when it gave CDCR an extra $380 million last year.

As Cedillo and other angry assemblymembers at the hearing noted, the extra money went to Corrections while programs for the elderly, the sick and children all suffered cuts.

But after years of what amounted to fictional cost estimates and perpetually blown budgets for the state's most expensive agency, Gov. Jerry Brown and lawmakers agreed to a 2011-12 budget that gave the $9 billion-plus department the extra money. According to figures provided to The Bee by Assembly Budget Committee Chairman Bob Blumenfield's office, it was the fourth year in the past five that the Legislature kicked up extra money to cover CDCR's overspending. The augmenting funds totaled nearly $3 billion.

Last year, hoping to get costs under control, the Legislature added reporting strings to the money. The first report was due within 75 days of the budget's enactment last June. A second report is due today. Corrections hasn't produced any information yet.

The Bee's state worker pay database has been upgraded with features that give the information more context and provide it more quickly.

The data now include state employee wage histories from calendar 2007 through the end of last year. Clicking on an individual's name pulls up their historical wages graphically in the context of the average pay in their department. Scrolling over the data points in the graph reveals specific info.

The information on the site shows up more quickly than before because The Bee's web developers streamlined its layout and used a Google product that loads faster.

The screen capture above shows the wage history of one elected state worker in the Legislature. Click here to open the pay database page.

As we reported earlier this week, Department of Personnel Administration Director Ron Yank is leaving his post at the end of this month. The news -- which he spread himself in a series of personal calls and emails -- surprised labor leaders and state managers.

Late last month I asked Yank how he was enjoying his job as California's labor relations point man. "I love it," he said, and told me that he had no plans to leave.

I asked him that question nearly every time that we spoke over the last year. Yank didn't need the money, having retired from a long and successful career in labor law representing the California Correctional Peace Officers Association and other unions.

And I always wondered whether Yank, a marathon runner who admits to flashes of temper and salty language when it gets his point across, was suited to head a bureaucracy.

The DPA director sits at what can be an uncomfortable intersection between politics, law and finance. The job requires offering carrots and sticks to other department heads and labor leaders and walking a narrow path between the administrative independence that gives the office power while still executing the governor's agenda.

Ron Yank never struck me as a guy who was keen on asking for permission. His exit illustrated that fact. Instead of waiting for the governor's office to announce his departure and name a successor, he broke with protocol, picked up the phone and started calling union leaders to tell them he was leaving at the end of the month. The news quickly spread.

On Wednesday, Yank said that despite all of his assurances to the contrary, he took the post with the understanding he would leave after one year. That was all the time he was willing to take away from his family in the Bay Area, he said.

He didn't want to make that known for fear of hobbling his effectiveness. "If I'd been a lame duck, we couldn't have accomplished half the things we accomplished," he said as we drank coffee at a restaurant near DPA's offices on S Street.

What follows is an email to DPA staff with the subject line, "Why is Ron leaving his job after only one year?" Yank issued it a few hours after news of his exit surfaced on Tuesday. We're publishing it here after confirming its authenticity with DPA.

As of this morning, the Brown administration still hasn't issued an official statement about Yank's departure or named a successor.

Two sources have told The State Worker that Ron Yank is leaving the director's chair at the Department of Personnel Administration. Department spokeswoman Lynelle Jolley confirmed Yank's impending departure a few minutes ago.

The Brown administration hasn't yet named a successor to the state's top labor relations job, which Yank has held for a little over a year. Jolley said that Yank is leaving "around the end of this month."

Critics assumed that Gov. Jerry Brown named Yank, a retired labor lawyer, to the job as a make-good to public employee unions that supported his campaign, particularly the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. Yank counted CCPOA and the state's fire fighters' union as clients for many years before he retired from Carroll, Burdick & McDonough LLP. His son, Jonathan Yank, also is a lawyer based in the firm's San Francisco office and handled CCPOA cases.

Yank countered that he would be an honest, impartial broker who would bring the respect of labor and years of experience to repair management relations damaged during epic battles with GOP Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. A few months after ank took the job, he closed contract talks with six unions that had refused to come to terms with Schwarzenegger.

Later, when Brown pressed to send more convicted criminals to local jails and downsize the state prison system, Yank negotiated key labor agreements that streamlined the layoff process for Corrections and Rehabilitation Department employees. The deal also eased the transfer process for state workers in the department to make it easier them to move from crowded facilities to others with vacancies.

Recently, Yank also ended the state's long-running dispute with CCPOA over union paid leave and settled furlough lawsuits with SEIU Local 1000 and the state's attorneys' union. CCPOA and the California Statewide Law Enforcement Association also recently dropped their furlough litigation.

We're planning to talk with Yank later today.

About six in 100 workers in California are employed by the state, according to a new Gallup Daily Tracking survey. The ratio more than doubles when federal and local government workers are included.

Some 5.6 percent of Golden State workers surveyed said they work for state government, the same percentage as Colorado. Thirty-six states had a higher percentage of workers who said they receive a state paycheck, led by Hawaii (12.6 percent), Alaska (11.5 percent) and West Virginia (11.2 percent).

On the other end of the spectrum, 4.8 percent of workers in Ohio and Maryland said they were state employees, followed by 4.4 percent in Pennsylvania and 4.3 percent in New Hampshire.

Nationally, 6.5 percent of the more than 129,000 American workers Gallup surveyed (including those in the District of Columbia) work for state government.

The statistic is somewhat misleading, however, because states distribute programs differently between federal, state and local governments.

By the larger measure, California ranked 33rd among the states with 15.3 percent of surveyed respondents saying they were government employees.

Nearly a third of workers in Hawaii, Alaska and the Maryland are in employed by government, the highest percentages in the nation.The lowest: Vermont, Michigan and Pennsylvania, which all hovered around 12 percent.

Nationally, 16.3 percent of American workers drew a government paycheck in 2011, a 1 percent decline from 2009. The job losses in the 50 states and the District of Columbia were spread equally over federal, state, and local governments and are consistent with Bureau of Labor Statistics data, Gallup said. Still, government employs at least 1 in 10 workers in every state.

Click here to see the government employment percentages for all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This link opens Gallup's take on the numbers.

MAP: Courtesy Gallup

View more videos at: http://nbcbayarea.com.

Thanks to Blog User J for flagging this story for The State Worker.

The State Worker has obtained the settlement agreements that end two furlough lawsuits against the state in exchange for restoring back pay for a handful of employees represented by the state's legal professionals' union.

Technically, the deal is two deals.

One settlement worked out between California Attorneys, Administrative Law Judges and Hearing Offices in State Employment and Gov. Jerry Brown's administration ends the furlough litigation.

The other is between CASE and the five departments that receive no legislative appropriation and employ about two dozen affected CASE members: First 5 California, the Prison Industry Authority, the California Earthquake Authority, the California Housing Finance Agency and the California State Lottery. That deal OKs paying back wages.

We emailed the agreements to Tim Yeung, a former Personnel Administration lawyer now in private practice, and asked him why the settlement was split.

"The only reason I can think of to split the settlement is to make it crystal clear that Governor Brown and the general fund are not on the hook for the payments from the 5 agencies who were not part of the budget appropriation," Yeung said said in an email.

You can read the union and administration agreement that ends furlough litigation by clicking here. The departments' back pay agreement with CASE is available via this link. Or you can read the embedded documents below:

As we reported last week, the California Correctional Peace Officers Association has reached a deal with the state to settle its union paid leave bill for $3.5 million by making payments over the next nine years sans interest.

The figure represents $1 million less than the state said the union owes on the tab that runs back to 2005, but it's $500,000 more than CCPOA said it owes the state.

Click here to read the language of the settlement, which we wrote about in last week's State Worker column.

So what do you think about the agreement?

We can never get everything we learn into a news story. "From the notebook" posts give you some of the extra details behind the news.

Our story in today's Bee examines various factors that have contributed to a management shortage at Cal Fire, particularly the dwindling number of assistant chiefs and the revival of department pay differentials this month intended to correct the problem.

To understand the last 10 years of wage history at Cal Fire, we looked at ...

The Legislative Analyst's June 2, 2006, evaluation of the contract with Bargaining Unit 8, California Department of Forestry Firefighters.

The Sept. 18, 2001, Assembly Floor analysis of AB 649, the bill that included the 2001 Unit 8 contract. (The LAO didn't run labor contract analyses until a 2005 law required them.)

We also looked at revised Pay Differential 369, below, which lays out the details of the recruiting and retention differential revived for Cal Fire assistant chiefs and others in the same Chief Officer series. Of note: The differentials count toward pension calculations, but the "PERSability" is phased in over two years.
Cal Fire Recruitment and Retention Differentials

State Compensation Insurance Fund has paid $30 million to 971 state employees who agreed to leave the agency by Dec. 31 and give up their preferential rights to other state government jobs.

The exit payments averaged nearly $31,000 per departing employee in addition to any leave time they cashed out. The money went to staff members in danger of layoff who accepted the so-called "transition package" under terms negotiated by the quasi-public agency and Service Employees International Union Local 1000. It was the first time that state workers whose jobs were in danger received extra money to leave.

The quasi-public State Fund, which competes with private-sector workers compensation insurance carriers and receives no tax dollars, has been downsizing for a couple of years in response to its shrinking market share. About 1,800 employees in 26 job classifications slated for elimination could have taken the deal at an estimated cost of up to $50 million to State Fund.

On a related note, State Fund spokeswoman Jennifer Vargen forwarded a revised layoff list (embedded below) that shows that 705 jobs are still on the chopping block after the voluntary departures have been figured in.

(The "auth." column shows how many jobs the fund has authorized to keep. The "final potential layoff" column shows how many jobs will be cut. Adding the two columns together indicates how many positions currently exist.)

The biggest cuts are planned for Los Angeles County (181 jobs), Alameda County (143) and Orange County (86). Sacramento County stands to lose 36 jobs and San Joaquin County is facing a loss of 28 positions.
120123 SCIF Layoffs by Class and County

About 470 Caltrans employees in Fresno have nowhere to work today after their offices flooded over the weekend.

Around 7 p.m. on Friday, rain started leaking into the department's offices at the Manchester Center, said Caltrans Fresno district spokesman Jose Camarena.

The leaks at the two-floor office facility were so severe that they brought down suspended ceiling tiles, went into walls and seeped down to the lower floor.

"Maybe a quarter of the floor space was directly affected," Camarena said in a telephone interview this morning. "The entire building is closed off today."

The Caltrans offices in Manchester Center house project managers and design engineers. All were told to stay home today while inspectors and contractors check out the water damage and assess repairs. The department expects they will have an estimate by day's end.

"For the remainder of the week, we're looking at our other (Caltrans) worksites (in Fresno)," Camarena said. Those plans include converting training rooms and meeting rooms into workspace while the Manchester offices are repaired.

The Department of Personnel Administration has published a new "performance management guide." The department wants managers, supervisors, executives and other non-rank-and-file employees to use it to develop their leadership and build teamwork.

Click here to watch a brief video by DPA Chief Deputy Director Howard Schwartz.

Here's the 45-page guide. Do you think this is helpful? Will managers and supervisors use it? Do materials like this help make the state a better employer?
120120 DPA PMG

Didn't we just do this?

With contracts covering tens of thousands of state employees set to expire this summer, the Department of Personnel Administration has scheduled meetings in February and March so that the government and four unions can publicly release their initial bargaining proposals.

Agreements with the International Union of Operating Engineers (Unit 12), the Union of American Physicians and Dentists (Unit 16), the California Association of Psychiatric Technicians (Unit 18) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (Unit 19) expire July 1. The four groups represent roughly 24,000 state workers.

With just 400 to 450 words for our weekly State Worker column, some of what we learn each week never sees print. Column Extras give you the notes, the quotes and the observations that inform what's published.

Here are a few sources that underpinned today's State Worker column in The Bee:

The Little Hoover Commission's summary of gubernatorial reorganization plans dating back to the first term of the Ronald Reagan administration.

"Boards and Commissions in State Government" by the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley.

"Little Hoover Commission's Role in Governor's Reorganization Process"

As noted in today's State Worker column, the FI$Cal project is struggling to find funding and skilled employees to execute the plan to merge departments' array of dissimilar IT finance and operations systems into one.

It seems like any time the state takes on an ambitious project that it runs into trouble: cost overruns, staff who jump ship, vendor problems, service contract cost overruns and the like. Take our poll to register what you think:

With just 400 to 450 words for our weekly State Worker column, most of what we learn each week never sees print. Column Extras give you some of the notes, the quotes and the observations that inform what's published.

Our column in today's Bee outlines State Auditor Elaine Howle's update on the Financial Information System for California, the biggest information technology project in state government.

Click here to read Howle's latest FI$Cal report, which has more details about the project than we could cram into our column.

If you haven't already, check out the list of agencies, departments, boards, offices and commissions that Gov. Jerry Brown wants to ax, reorganize and consolidate, then take our poll:

Now that we've had time to digest Gov. Jerry Brown's hastily-unveiled 2012-13 budget proposal summary, we've boiled down the full list of changes he's suggesting to streamline state government:

Gov. Jerry Brown's new budget plan would eliminate a few thousand state jobs and consolidate or ax nearly 50 state organizations, according to documents released this afternoon.

Brown's first draft of the budget for the 2012-13 fiscal year that begins July 1 envisions reducing the state workforce by some 3,000 positions, mostly from the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The cuts fill a small part of the $9.2 billion budget hole projected through June 2013.

When asked whether state workers could expect layoffs or job elimination through attrition, Department of Finance Director Ana Matosantos said the goal is "reductions in positions."

The administration will "try to minimize the number of layoffs" by relocating employees whose positions have been eliminated, Matosantos said during an afternoon press conference. "But the total workforce will continue to go down."

Editors note, 12:20 p.m.: Details of the severance agreement have been added to this report.

Nearly 1,000 State Compensation Insurance Fund employees took an unusual severance package in December that required they leave their jobs by last Friday.

Fund spokeswoman Jennifer Vargen said that 971 employees accepted the so-called "transition package" under terms negotiated by the quasi-public agency and Service Employees International Union Local 1000. She said the total cost of the payouts isn't yet available.

About 1,800 employees in 26 job classifications slated for elimination could have taken the deal at an estimated cost of up to $50 million to State Fund.

State Fund employees who took the severance package waived their rights to preferential treatment for hiring into other state jobs and "probably" are not eligible for unemployment insurance benefits, Vargen said.

The agency sells employee compensation insurance to businesses. Although its employees are in state civil service, State Fund doesn't receive any tax funding, so the money to cover the exit payments came from the fund's investment assets and insured client premiums, not taxpayer dollars.

This is the latest installment in a series of posts looking back at the most-read State Worker blog items in 2011.

Each year the Bureau of State Audits publishes the results of investigations sparked by tips sent to its whistleblower hotline. Last August's compilation of investigations included stories of misused state vehicles, excessive break times and the mishandling of sensitive documents.

Some of the 300 or so comments on, "Audit chronicles state employee abuse and bad management," the third-most viewed State Worker blog item of 2011, accused The State Worker's report as a thinly veiled attempt to cast all state workers as dishonest and lazy. Others thought the item proved that all state workers are dishonest and lazy.

Our take: One definition of news is that which is out of the ordinary. That's why the sun's rise each morning isn't news. We expect it to happen.

The auditor's report was news because it chronicled bad behavior -- actions by state employees that were outside of the ordinary. We hope that the day never arrives that inefficiency and ineptitude are considered so routine that they're not worth covering.

More than 250 Assembly employees -- roughly one of every five people who work for the lower house -- received pay increases this month, as Jim Sanders reports in today's Bee.

We've put together a spreadsheet, below, of those awarded the increases.

You can search a master list, as well as lists of employees making more than $100,000 or less than $50,000, as well as the aides of Sacramento area lawmakers. You'll also find a list of those awarded the largest percentage increases.

The lists don't include employees who received a promotion and a commensurate pay increase.

Read the spreadsheet detailing California Assembly's pay hikes

This is the first in a series of posts counting down the most-read State Worker blog items and columns of 2011.

What a difference an administration makes. With the departure of Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, the constant furlough news that flowed from his administration simply dried up. Enter Democrat Gov. Jerry Brown, and the 2011 news spotlight shifted to state worker pay and pensions. Of the 900 items posted on The State Worker blog this year, nine of the 10 most-viewed involved one or both of those issues.

Which leads us to the 10th-most read State Worker item: last summer's news that Democrat Controller John Chiang launched a website that details the pay, pension benefits and other compensation data for about 1 millon California state and local employees.

July 5 Controller publishes state government and CSU payroll figures

PHOTO: Controller John Chiang during a 2010 interview at The Bee's Capitol Bureau / Hector Amezcua, Sacramento Bee

Welcome to the fifth and final entry (for now) of "Dialing for CalPERS," the ongoing (and highly unscientific) series that spot checks how long the fund's Interactive Voice Response system says callers must wait to speak with a real person.

CalPERS said it tweaked the system this morning and indeed it did. The voice recording starts by warning that peak call hours are between 9 a.m. and 11 a.m.: "You may experience a shorter wait time by calling before or after these hours." Good move.

We headed into member services to apply for retirement, since more state workers retire in December than any other month. We asked for a representative and encountered the system's other new feature: an estimated range of time on hold. In this case, it was between 33 minutes and 45 minutes.

We also understand that the fund has made changes to allow more callers to get a call back rather than remain on hold. The fund is still adjusting that program, officials said at today's CalPERS board meeting.

Kudos to CalPERS for making changes to the system that will, hopefully, reduce stress levels for callers and call center employees alike.

IMAGE: www.photobucket.com

It's Day 4 of "Dialing for CalPERS," the ongoing and highly unscientific series that spot checks how long the fund's Interactive Voice Response system says callers must wait to speak with a real person.

Hold time for a 4:10 p.m call today to the disability benefits unit, according to the automated system: 29 minutes.

We've been talking to CalPERS about the situation. Officials there say that the IVR's estimates often overstate caller hold times. Here's an explanation and a tip on when are the best time and worst times to call in:

Welcome to Day 2 of "Dialing for CalPERS," a regular (and highly unscientific) feature that reports how long the fund's Interactive Voice Response system tells us we have to wait to speak to a representative when we call in.

We called CalPERS today at 10:13 a.m. and worked our way through the automated phone system to the death benefits unit to get a claim status. Estimated hold time: 1 hour, 15 minutes.

Curious to see if the hold time was the same if we were seeking other information, we called back and navigated to retiree health benefits, specifically long-term care. The phone system suggested we check a specific website, call a different number for information or speak to a CalPERS representative. Hold time for that: 1 hour, 23 minutes.

CalPERS has said it's working on getting the telephone hold times down and has statistics that indicate that actual telephone wait times on average have been about 30 minutes. Fund spokesman Brad Pacheco is working on getting new figures, which we'll share here. Click here for more background. Next week we'll start a chart to track the results from our daily spot checks.

IMAGE: photobucket.com

We're unveiling "Dialing for CalPERS," a regular (and highly unscientific) feature that will report how long the fund's call-routing Interactive Voice Response system tells us we have to wait to speak to a representative when we call in.

Today we navigated the system to the retiree death benefits at 10:30 a.m. The IVR voice on the other end of the line said we'd have to wait 1 hour and 33 minutes to speak to a representative.

CalPERS is continuing to experience "unusually long" wait times when members call in, the fund's recording says, a by-product of a transition to its 3-month-old, half-billion-dollar computer system. The State Worker has heard from dozens of disgruntled government employees and retirees with tales of phone waits of up to 2 hours or more when they're trying to get information or straighten out errors. (Click here for a recent report on the CalPERS computer system.)

Fund spokesman Brad Pacheco said in a Nov. 29 email that the fund has been fine-tuning the telephone system and offered these statistics:

During the 10 weeks since we launched my|CalPERS, 34 members out of the 98,000 calls answered waited more than 2 hours.

During the last 2 weeks, 3 members out of the over 17,000 calls answered waited more than 2 hours. Our average wait time for members over the past two weeks has been 27 minutes.

We'll post CalPERS' lastest numbers when they become available and we'll continue our own little spot checks. Don't be surprised if on-hold times are up, since December is a heavy month for the fund's call center because so many employees retire at the end of the year.

IMAGE: photobucket.com

As the quasi-public State Compensation Insurance Fund continues its plan to downsize, several of its employees have contacted The State Worker to point out a section of a 2009 RAND Institute for Civil Justice study that recommends reducing the number of the fund's permanent staff to remove incentives for it to maintain market share to justify State Fund's staffing.

Here's the pertinent paragraph from "California's Volatile Workers' Compensation Insurance Market: Problems and Recommendations for Change," by Lloyd Dixon, James W. Macdonald, William Barbagallo.

A question has come up from a few State Worker blog users about the severance package that the State Compensation Insurance Fund is offering employees in danger of layoff: Can State Fund staff who recently decided to leave rather than move or be terminated get the package?

We didn't think the offer could be made retroactive, but just to be sure, we emailed the question to State Fund spokeswoman Jennifer Vargen.

"This is only for current employees in classifications identified for layoff," Vargen said in a responding email.

IMAGE: www.photobucket.com

Washington state's auditor says that nearly 6,700 state-issued cellphones that cost the government $1.8 million -- nearly a third of those reviewed -- were used infrequently or not at all during a study that ran from March 2010 through February of this year. Of those, a third weren't used one time during the audit period, reported Washington State Auditor Brian Sonntag, but the state still paid more than $533,000 for them.

The Washington audit, which you can read here, echoes a similar study of California's state cellphones that found about 25 percent of the 54,000 wireless lines tracked in December 2010 weren't used -- but still cost the government more than $300,000.

Those finding supported Gov. Jerry Brown's February order to cut the government's cellphone inventory in half by June 1 of this year.

Departments turned in about 29,000 of 67,000 cellphones covered by Brown's order, with thousands more still under review as of the deadline, the administration said at the time.

Prompted by the Washington audit, we're curious about the impact to California state workers of the state's cellphone slim-down nearly six months later:

We never get all of what we learn into a news story, but this blog can give users the data, the notes and the quotes from the notebook that informed what was published.

Want to dig more deeply into State Compensation Insurance Fund's agreement to pay up to $50 million in severance packages to exiting employees? Here you go:

• The agreement between State Fund and SEIU Local 1000

• The contract between State Fund and the "legally uninsured Departments of the State of California."

• The Nov. 9 SEIU Local 1000 "Union Update" flyer that explains how some employees at State Fund moved to avoid a layoff and then found out their jobs were in jeopardy anyway.

• Our Oct. 9 story about State Fund layoffs.

As we reported earlier today, State Compensation Insurance Fund employees targeted for lay off can receive what amounts to severance pay if they volunteer to leave by Dec. 31.

Here's the 'transition package' State Fund negotiated with SEIU Local 1000:

We can never get everything we learn into a news story. "From the notebook" posts give you some of the extra details behind the news.

Bay Bridge construction inspection controversy from the perspective of the ongoing debate between labor and business over public-private partnerships.

Here are some of the documents and websites that informed the column:

California Pension Reform's Mike Genest has issued this statement about the LAO's review of Gov. Jerry Brown's pension proposals:

It is disappointing that the LAO omits the most critical flaw of the Governor's proposal: By his own admission his plan only solves $4-$11 billion of what is at least a $240 billion unfunded liability. While the Governor's plan has merits, it solves less than 5% of our problem. We need bold, comprehensive reform now and cannot continue to wait as politicians debate the issue and tinker around the edges.

California Pension Reform recently filed two ballot proposals with the attorney general's office for official title and summary. It hopes to start gathering signatures in January in hopes of qualifying one of the two measures for the November 2012 ballot.

Californians for Retirement Security, a labor coalition representing 1.5 million state and local public employees, has issued a statement in response to this morning's LAO review of Gov. Jerry Brown's pension reform package.

Here's the statement emailed to media a few minutes ago quoting Dave Low, the coalition's chairman:

The LAO's mixed assessment of the Governor's pension proposals hits the nail on the head when it says that the Legislature should move forward in a deliberate and reasoned fashion to craft solutions to California's complex pension systems. There are far too many unanswered questions and lack of details to fairly and accurately evaluate the impact of these proposals. Those proposals that impair the negotiated benefits of current employees are a legal dead end. As the report points out, these are matters that should be settled at the bargaining table, not in courtrooms. We will continue to work in the upcoming Legislative session, just as we have for the past several years, to achieve the spirit of the Governor's reforms without taking a wrecking ball to the retirement security of California's teachers, firefighters, police officers, and other public workers.

PHOTO: Dave Low / Courtesy California School Employees Association

Watch Modesto for an indication of the public's mood about public pension "reform." Residents of the Central Valley city on Tuesday consider three ballot measures that sound a lot like retirement changes proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown and others rolled out last week by the California Pension Reform group.

Measures Q, R and S, written by city councilman and mayoral candidate Brad Hawn, are non-binding advisory measures, but they would gauge the direction that that residents in the Stanislaus County seat think their officials should take labor negotiations.

Measure Q asks whether the city should transition from traditional defined benefit pensions for employees to defined contribution plans common in the private sector. Measure R asks whether the city should jettison the single-year salary factor for pension calculations in favor of a three-year salary average. Measure S asks voters to weigh in on increasing the minimum retirement age, which for most city employees is 55. Police officers and firefighters can start drawing pensions at age 50.

Click here for the measures' ballot language. Click here for the Stanislaus County sample ballot. Analyses and statements for and against Q, R and S start on PDF page 36.

Labor has launched local ads against the measures, including the one above that criticizes pushing back the retirement age for police.

Hat tip to Blog User S for alerting us to the union ad.

State Controller John Chiang (known in some state worker circles as "St. John" for his stands against state employee furloughs and withholding their pay during budget negotiation deadlocks) will visit The Bee's Capitol Bureau this morning at 10 a.m.

Got a question you'd like us to ask? Submit it via our Capitol Alert or State Worker Facebook accounts. Time is short! Send those questions now!

PHOTO: Controller John Chiang speaks to the Bee's Capitol Bureau staff during a visit last year. / Hector Amezcua, Sacramento Bee 2010.

As we noted in this morning's news round up, Bee Capitol Bureau colleague David Siders reports that Gov. Jerry Brown will unveil his much-anticipated pension "reform" proposals on Thursday. We hear that Brown is meeting with government and labor officials today to give them a preview of his plan.

The Thursday announcement will follow today's special legislative committee hearing on pension reform.

Brown's office has kept details of the governor's plan under wraps and the governor himself has offered no specifics.

We expect the governor will suggest many of the same ideas that he proposed as a gubernatorial candidate and then again after taking office earlier this year.

But one nagging pension reform tease that Brown threw out last week has some labor interests worried.

Our Saturday story about the first wave of 26,000 layoff warning notes going out to Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation staff included this sentence:

The state estimates shifting responsibility for some newly sentenced criminals to counties will save the corrections department about $453 million in this fiscal year and progressively more in subsequent years as the state prison and parole population dwindles.

Several readers over the weekend asked for more information. In response, we've embedded a Corrections/Department of Finance document below that outlines several prison and parole estimates, all keyed to an expectation that the state can shrink the current inmate population by 25 percent and the adult parole population by nearly two-thirds by fiscal 2014-15. The department's anticipated realignment savings that final year would be nearly $1.46 billion, or more than three times the savings officials think the policy will generate this year.

A few other points from the plan that jump out:

• The plan eliminates 3,700 out-of-state prison beds but keeps 8,000.
• It reduces CDCR academy funding to 400 correctional officers per year, about 800 fewer than leave service annually.
• The department started the 2011-12 fiscal year with 2,000 correctional officer openings.
• Correctional officer, nurse and physician assistant layoffs will be "mitigated through vacancy sweeps and attrition."
• The plan envisions laying off "most if not all retired annuitants."

We never get all of what we learn into a news story, but this blog can give users the data, the notes and the quotes from the notebook that informed what was published.

Our story in today's Bee expands on the news The State Worker broke on Friday that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is issuing 26,000 layoff warnings -- the so-called "State Restriction of Appointments" notice -- although it's not clear how many workers will be ultimately affected.

Word that notices would be going out started moving through the department earlier this week. Here's the text of an email that went out to some parole staff on Thursday:

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is issuing some 26,000 layoff warning notices to its employees over the next few days as it begins downsizing and shifting some of its work to local governments.

It's not clear how many employees are actually in danger of losing their jobs. Corrections is sending out more notices than the number of positions it expects it will cut, said Judy Gelein, deputy director of human resources for the CDCR.

The state has already started shifting its responsibility for some newly sentenced criminals to counties, creating a "timing issue," Gelein said, to quickly evaluate Corrections' personnel needs and make changes.

The department started mailing the notices today to staff with fewer than 10 years of service . CDCR can only process about 6,000 notices per day for mailing, so the bad news will continue going out into next week.

This blog has been following the problems with water, mold, falling glass, toxics and malfunctioning elevators at the Board of Equalization headquarters in Sacramento for quite some time.

The Department of General Services, which acts as the landlord of the 450 N St. property, has poured millions of dollars into the building and has said that the fixes would bring the space up to standards.

Still, the five-member board, BOE Executive Director Kristine Cazadd and many of the 2,900 staff who work in the building think it's time to move. Here's an email from one of them, BOE employee Annie Mac. We're publishing her words, unedited and with her permission:

Family members of slain hospital employee Donna Gross, state lawmakers and state workers will gather at various locations around California on Sunday to highlight concerns for patient and employee safety at state mental health facilities.

The Safety Now! Coalition is organizing the events at seven state facilities to observe the anniversary of her death at Napa State Hospital. The 54-year-old psychiatric technician from Concord had worked at the hospital for 14 years when she was killed last year by patient Jess Willard Massey.

In response to our Tuesday report on the water-logged, mold-infested, faintly-toxic Board of Equalization headquarters building, BOE Executive Director Kristine Cazadd sent the following e-mail to The State Worker. We're publishing it, unedited, with her permission:

A new report from the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Labor Research and Education and Center for Wage and Employment Dynamics finds that state budget woes around the country have come from imploding housing markets and the Great Recession -- not public employee costs.

The report takes a look at the relationship between public sector workers, their unions, and state budget deficits.

"The Wrong Target: Public Sector Unions and State Budget Deficits" by researchers Sylvia Allegretto, Ken Jacobs and Laurel Lucia concludes that:

With just 400 to 450 words for our weekly State Worker column, some of what we learn each week never sees print. Column Extras give you the notes, the quotes and the observations that inform what's published.

Our column in today's fiber/cyber Bee about a new law governing state personal services contracts invalidations distills information from several sources:

The State Auditor's awkwardly-titled, "Departments of Health Care Services and Public Health: Their Actions Reveal Flaws in the State's Oversight of the California Constitution's Implied Civil Service Mandate and in the Departments' Contracting for Information Technology Services."

Assembly Bill 740, which is intended to add heft to State Personnel Board decisions that invalidate personnel contracts.

An AB 740 fact sheet published by the bill's author, Assemblyman Bob Blumenfield, D-Woodland Hills.

A May 18, 2011 letter and attachments from SEIU Local 1000 attorney Anne Giese to state Personnel Board Chief Counsel Chian He, laying out the union's concerns about food service contracting at two Veterans Affairs facilities.

The Board of Equalization is in the midst of employee meetings scheduled for today and Wednesday to talk about its leaky, mold-infested, mechanically unreliable, slightly toxic headquarters at 450 N St. in Sacramento.

The building has been a money pit for the state and an unnerving place to work for many of the 2,900 or so employees who work there. The building's landlord, the Department of General Services, has spent millions of dollars on things like replacing leaky windows, fixing busted pipes, cleaning up toxic mold and repairing malfunctioning elevators.

Yvonne Walker, president of SEIU Local 1000, said in a telephone interview this morning that the union will continue to push for easier access to government outsourcing costs, despite Gov. Jerry Brown's veto of a labor-backed measure aimed at making those expenses more transparent.

Walker said she was disappointed that Brown vetoed Assembly Bill 172, which would have forced the state agencies and departments to post contracts of $5,000 or more on the Reporting Transparency in Government website.

While labor had a big stake in the measure because it would have put a spotlight on what the state pays for outside services, Walker said that the bill "isn't just about the workers we represent, it's about how the public's dollars are being spent. We're going to be a watchdog on this."

A recent technology upgrade and a possible pension policy change has backed up the workload at CalPERS.

The fund went offline for a little more than two weeks last month to switch computer systems, which temporarily shut down processing retirement and reinstatement applications and processing member enrollment into health and dental plans.

That wasn't a surprise. Fund officials anticipated the Sept. 2 to Sept. 18 shutdown would impact its member services and put out the word.

At the same time, CalPERS has been hit with a flood of service credit pricing requests. Gov. Jerry Brown's anticipated plan to ax "airtime" purchases has prompted the surge in inquiries, we hear.

As we reported earlier today, State Compensation Insurance Fund's President and CEO Tom Rowe has announced a plan to layoff up to 1,800 of the organization's 7,300 employees by the second quarter of next year.

Here's the text of the e-mail that went out at noon:

The quasi-public State Compensation Insurance Fund is planning to lay off between 1,500 and 1,800 employees in jobs that officials say have been crowded out by evolving technology and business practices as the insurer battles for market share and to hold down its expenses.

State Fund estimates it will save $150 million per year in employee costs. It's the first time the organization has announced layoffs since the Great Depression.

The fund's 7,300 employees around the state received word in an e-mail today from State Fund President and CEO Tom Rowe.

"We don't have all the details yet," Rowe said in the e-mail, "but we anticipate layoffs being effective by the 2nd Quarter of 2012."

Fund spokeswoman Jennifer Vargen said that officials aren't ready to announce which facilities or counties would see the biggest staffing cutbacks.

UC Berkeley's Center for Labor Research and Education has released "Meeting California's Retirement Security Challenge," which argues for a return to private-sector defined benefit pensions.

The center said that the work was supported by International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers Local 1245, Service Employees International Union California State Council, and Californians for Retirement Security.

Over on our sister blog, Capitol Alert, Dan Walters has some details. We've also posted the 118-page research compilation below.

The hiring requests submitted to Gov. Jerry Brown's administration often show how thinking at the agency or department level conflicted with what decision makers in the governor's office defined "essential" jobs or how vacancies could be filled.

The Department of Transportation, for example, asked to hire an administrative assistant II who would work for the director of Caltrans. The position would have cost the department about $64,000 per year.

Failing to fill it would mean "the Director's ability to respond to urgent requests ... may be impaired. Responses to the Governor's Office and External Agencies may be delayed if the Director is not apprised of the priority," the department said. "Actions at this level affect the Department and Director's image and the ability to produce desired results."

Transportation couldn't transfer internally to fill the job, it said, because the vacant position "is the only Administrative Assistant II position in the Department."

The Brown administration gave the hire a thumbs down and offered an outside-the-org-chart solution:

Gov. Jerry Brown's hiring freeze order is pretty darn explicit: No hiring for jobs that aren't "critical" functions of a department's "core" mission. No hiring for positions that aren't front-line jobs providing essential front-line services, such as public safety jobs.

Toxic Substances' request No. I-0008, which we've posted below, said the department needed to hire a chief of its Office of Criminal Investigations (cost: $138,000 per year), to supervise its investigators and scientists. The public safety duties of the job made it a candidate for a freeze exemption, the department said, and leaving it empty would, "result in reduced law enforcement field presence in California."

That's not all. Leave the job unfilled, the department said, and you're weakening the deterrent for illegal hazardous waste dumping and you're hampering fair competition between businesses that follow hazardous waste handling and disposal rules and those businesses that don't.

Despite those dire predictions, the Brown administration slammed the request with three terse sentences:

We're approaching the finish line of our project to post hiring request forms submitted by dozens of state departments, agencies, commissions and offices seeking exemptions from Gov. Jerry Brown's executive order. The documents were the foundation for a recent story on how the administration is enforcing Brown's hiring freeze.

Click the following links to download hiring freeze exemptions filed by the Prison Industry Authority, the Public Utilities Commission, the Office of Real Estate Appraisers and the River-Mountains Conservancy. (To see what Parks & Recreation requested, click here.)

We're continuing our project to post hiring request forms submitted by dozens of state departments, agencies and offices seeking exemptions from Gov. Jerry Brown's executive order. The documents were the foundation for a recent story on how the administration is enforcing Brown's hiring freeze.

Next up: Hiring freeze exemptions filed by the Department of Managed Health Care, which received permission to hire for three of the 15 jobs it wanted to fill, the Department of Mental Health (approved for 131 of 171 requests) and the Office of Planning and Research (got the OK to hire for the one position it wanted to fill).

The state's reliance on retired annuitants, a sore subject for many state workers and for pension reform advocates, surfaced in an unusual hiring freeze exemption request filed earlier this year by the Department of Health Care Services.

The department asked on May 27 to hire a retired annuitant a specific retiree for an $8,000-per-month Research Program Specialist II job. The retiree had been training his successor to do everything from data mapping and research to to regulation review and survey analysis.

The replacement wasn't ready to take over and the department needed the retiree, whose name is redacted from the document provided to The State Worker, to stick around to finish preparing his successor to take over.

Failing to keep the RA to complete the institutional knowledge hand-off would "significantly delay the review of all policy findings including contracts, disclosure statements, riders, promotional materials, applications, coverage documents and actuarial memoranda." Ultimately the data analysis used for pricing some insurance policies could be affected.

No go, said the Brown administration in its June 28 response to request No. I-015, which we've posted below.

State workers are necessary, but some are more necessary than others.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection's request to hire 57 employees dramatically illustrates how Gov. Jerry Brown's hiring freeze order draws a line between essential and non-essential employees during the government's tough fiscal times.

The Brown administration OK'd 52 of Cal Fire's requests. Foresters, heavy fire equipment operators and 12 research program specialists all got the nod.

Research program specialists? Whaaaa?

The Fair Political Practices Commission signed off on fines for more than a dozen current and former CalPERS board members and employees today, closing the books on an investigation that started with 58 people connected to the mammoth pension fund.

The action today rubber stamped penalties already agreed to by 16 individuals who violated state law by failing to report meals, alcohol, clothing, sports and entertainment tickets and other gifts received from CalPERS investment partners since 2006.

The fines ranged from $3,600 against portfolio manager Shaun Greenwood to $200 for Sue Kane an adviser to CalPERS' board President Rob Feckner.

Our hiring freeze story in Sunday's fiber/cyber Bee used data collected from hundreds of pages of forms submitted by dozens of state departments, agencies and offices seeking exemptions from Gov. Jerry Brown's executive order.

It also prompted several calls and about a dozen emails from state employees asking, "What about my department?"

So we're posting daily links to the documents we used for that report so that you can see the figures, read the departments' rationale for hiring and the Brown administration's responses.

Today's batch: The Department of Financial Institutions and the Department of Fish & Game:

With just 400 to 450 words for our weekly State Worker column, most of what we learn each week never sees print. Column Extras give you some of the notes, the quotes and the observations that inform what's published.

Our column in today's Bee briefly refers to part of a report by the San Diego-based Telework Research Network that concludes the state could save millions of dollars each year by letting employees telework two days per week.

The report goes further, estimating that teleworking at both state and local government levels would have a total impact on budgets and social costs of $6.1 billion, as the chart at right shows. (Click it to enlarge.)

Some experts, such as Cal Poly Pomona professor Ralph Westfall, caution that telework impact estimates are often overstated by firms hoping to cash in on the trend. (Click here for links to some of what Westfall has written about the topic.)

Our hiring freeze story in Sunday's fiber/cyber Bee used data collected from hundreds of pages of forms submitted by dozens of state departments, agencies and offices seeking exemptions from Gov. Jerry Brown's executive order.

We're posting daily links to the documents we used for that report so that you can see the figures, read the departments' rationale for hiring and the Brown administration's responses.

We're skipping Corrections and Rehabilitation (since we posted those hiring requests on Sunday) and picking up with the Delta Stewardship Council through the state Environmental Protection Agency:

Our story in Sunday's fiber/cyber Bee used data collected from hundreds of pages of forms submitted by dozens of state departments, agencies and offices seeking exemptions from Gov. Jerry Brown's hiring freeze.

We're posting daily links to the documents we used for that report so that you can see the figures, read the departments' rationale for hiring and the Brown administration's responses.

Here's the next batch from Consumer Affairs and Corporations:

We never get all of what we learn into a news story, but this blog can give users the data, the notes and the quotes from the notebook that informed what was published.

Our story in Sunday's fiber/cyber Bee uses data culled from hundreds of pages of forms submitted by dozens of state departments, agencies and offices seeking exemptions from Gov. Jerry Brown's hiring freeze.

Over the next two weeks, we intend to post daily links to the documents we used so that you can see the figures, read the departments' arguments for hiring and the Brown administration's responses.

Here's the first batch, Air Resources through Conservation:

The state engineers' union has asked the California Supreme Court to intervene in a San Francisco road project, contending that it violates state law.

The Friday filing by Professional Engineers in California Government asks the high court to review the public-private Park Presidio road project, which is being built as a public-private partnership, or P3 in governmentspeak.

The case raises again the classic debate over the performance and cost-effectiveness of government versus the private sector. So far, PECG has twice lost the court fight, despite the Presidio project's estimated cost tripling from $473 million when it was competitively bid to $1.4 billion as a no-bid P3.

We never get all of what we learn into a news story, but this blog can give users the data, the notes and the quotes from the notebook that informed what was published.

Our story in today's Bee examines how Gov. Jerry Brown's administration is enforcing his Feb. 15 hiring freeze order.

Today's piece mentions four departments that sought exemptions with varying degrees of success: the Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs, the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the California Highway Patrol and the Department of Parks and Recreation.

What follows are links to download those departments' hiring freeze exemption requests and the Brown administration's responses. Starting Monday, we'll begin posting daily all the exemption requests that went into our hiring freeze calculations. It will probably take two weeks or a little longer to put all of them online.

We're working on a story about Gov. Jerry Brown's hiring freeze. We'd like to get state workers' perspectives into the piece: What are you hearing about hiring where you work? If you've received an SROA notice and are looking for a new position, how is it going? What are colleagues telling you?

This isn't for everybody. We're looking for people who wouldn't mind being on the record. The story would make it clear that you're not speaking for your employer. If you'd like to be part of our report, we'd like to hear from you. Call (916) 321-1043 or e-mail jortiz@sacbee.com. The story's deadline is 3 p.m. on Friday.

Meanwhile, here's our hiring freeze poll question:

With just 400 to 450 words for our weekly State Worker column, most of what we learn each week never sees print. Column Extras give you some of the notes, the quotes and the observations that inform what's published.

Our column in today's Bee looks at the final chapter of the Fair Political Practices Commission's investigation into gift reporting lapses at CalPERS.

Bottom line: The investigation turned up paperwork gaps and 16 people have agreed to pay fines totaling about $20,000 for failing to disclose some freebies they received from companies doing business with CalPERS.

In an unusual move, FPPC Chief of Enforcement Gary Winuk, wrote a memo to commissioners about the investigation in advance of the Sept. 22 hearing set to consider the 16 stipulated settlements reached. He concluded that there were several factors working in CalPERS favor, including the employees' and board members' cooperation, confusion between an in-house reporting mandate and what the law requires and CalPERS' "strict no-gifts rule for staff and ethics training programs that go beyond the requirements of state law."
CalPERS investigation memo by FFPC Enforcement Chief Gary Winuk

A measure that would require state agencies and departments to terminate illegal private contracts is on its way to Gov. Jerry Brown's desk.

Assembly Bill 740, authored by Assemblyman Bob Blumenfield, D-Woodland Hills, cleared the Senate last Thursday on a 24-14 vote. The Assembly voted 54-17 in May to approve it.

SEIU Local 1000, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees and Professional Engineers in California Government, supported the bill, which aims to strengthen laws against needless private contracting.

State Compensation Insurance Fund, which is undergoing big changes statewide, is consolidating all of its public phone contacts to a single, easy-to-remember number: (888) STATEFUND.

The number has been around a while, but it wasn't used across California until now.

Some fund employees are chuckling over the switch, given an agency-wide consolidation that shut down some offices and forced some workers to choose between moving, dealing with longer commutes or even leaving State Fund entirely.

That's because, after the toll-free 888, you just need to dial the first seven letters.

We'll let the fund employee who flagged the number switch in an email take it from here:

"State Fund employees have recently noticed that when you dial it, the number is actually 'STATE FU.' (They're) not sure if this new number means that the executives have a sense of humour or just lacking in judgment. The new joke around State Fund is 'Are you worried about being laid off? Just call, 1-888-STATE F U.' "

Just in from The Bee's Dan Walters on our sister blog, Capitol Alert:

California's state and local governments employed more than two million full- and part-time workers in 2010, and they were paid about $10 billion a month, a new data dump from the Census Bureau shows.

Click here for Dan's post.

Busted water pipes. Toxic mold. Leaky windows. Malfunctioning elevators. Falling glass.

Now add another ding on the long list of troubles at the Board of Equalization's headquarters at 450 N. St. in Sacramento: trace amounts of carcinogens.

The Department of General Services , which acts as the building's landlord, last month posted signs on the property that read: "Warning: Chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer, birth defects or other reproductive harm may be found in the facility. California Health and Safety Code Section 25249.6"

The reason, according to a Friday e-mail from BOE Interim Executive Director Kristine Cazadd, is that inspectors detected benzene and carbon disulfide in the building.

We've written plenty over the last few weeks about Gov. Jerry Brown's proposal to reshape California's state civil service by blending the non-constitutionally-mandated functions of the State Personnel Board and the Department of Personnel Administration into a new super-HR organization.

It looks like full speed ahead for the proposal, especially after Tuesday's bipartisan Senate committee support of Governor's Reorganization Plan No. 1.

The administration says the merger will save about $6 million by axing duplicated positions, but the Bigger Idea is to effect a cultural shift in the way the state handles current and potential employees.

What do you think? Will Brown's plan reach its lofty goal? Fall flat? Somewhere in between?

Two Senate committees this morning unanimously supported Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to create a mega-human resources department that will draw from the state's Personnel Board and Department of Personnel Administration.

The Senate Governmental Organization Committee, chaired by Sen. Rod Wright, D-Inglewood, and the Senate Public Employment and Retirement Committee, chaired by Sen. Gloria Negrete McLeod, D-Chino, asked several government officials whether the plan would weaken state employees' civil service protections.

The proponent of a ballot measure requiring public pensions in California to invest most of their assets in California firms can begin collecting the signatures from 807,615 registered voters to qualify the measure for the November 2012 election.

The proposal would require the state's public sector pension systems to maintain at least 85 percent of their investments in California-based businesses. The goal is to boost economic activity in the state.

The Legislative Analyst's Office said the measure wouldn't accomplish that goal and would probably hurt funds' investment returns.

Cal Watchdog has reported that Michael Lee Madsen, Sr., who submitted the initiative, is a North Highlands activist who lists his activities as "writing scripts and petitions." We've emailed him for a response to the LAO criticisms and to find out whether he has money to collect signatures by the Jan. 12, 2012, deadline. We'll let you know if we hear back.

Here's the attorney general's title and summary of the measure:

In case you missed it, check out Bee Capitol Bureau colleague David Siders' Sunday A1 story on of the reasons that some departments gave to Gov. Jerry Brown's administration that their cellphones should be exempt from his recall.

With that context, here are the documents laying out some of the departments' reasoning:

Office of Exposition Park Management
Department of Finance
Horse Racing Board
Parks and Recreation
Personnel Administration

PHOTO: 2002 Sacramento Bee Staff Photo.

With just 400 to 450 words for our weekly State Worker column, most of what we learn each week never sees print. Column Extras give you some of the notes, the quotes and the observations that inform what's published.

Our column in today's Bee examines state employee union concerns about Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to merge non-merit functions of the State Personnel Board and the Department of Personnel Administration.

This link opens the language of Brown's plan, Governor's Reorganization Plan No. 1. Here are the paragraphs that concern labor leaders:

A heart that stopped beating and a union grievance filing appear to have been enough to persuade the California Environmental Protection Agency to change course recently on the installation of automated external defibrillators at its headquarters.

The state scientist's union alleged that the agency stymied efforts for six months to deploy seven brand-new devices in a 25-story building that had only one other defibrillator device. Commonly referred to as AEDs, they are portable, purse-sized and battery-operated devices that provide electric shocks to help return a heart to a normal rhythm. Agency officials were hesitant to sign off on the new devices because of liability concerns.

Back-and-forth between agency officials, lawyers and employees who were advocating for these devices to be made handy boiled over last Wednesday. That was two days after a Department of Toxic Substances Control employee at his desk suffered sudden cardiac arrest, meaning his heart stopped beating.

In state buildings, it's up to individual departments whether or not they want to install defibrillators, according to Department of General Services spokeswoman Gretchen Zeagler. Some have installed them. Others haven't. No one really keeps track of the activity. In 2007, DGS and the California Emergency Medical Services Authority provided guidelines for those that do make AEDs available in state buildings. Though the DGS memo expired in 2008, Zeagler said it remains in effect until the department rescinds it, which hasn't happened.

Some state workers believe last week's incidents will convince employees in departments that don't maintain AEDs to lobby their managers to acquire them.

Updated at 2:30 p.m. with comments from SCIF and Runzheimer

The quasi-public State Compensation Insurance Fund continues to do business with a company that lost its state license nearly eight months ago.

Wisconsin-based Runzheimer International Ltd., which handles vehicle mileage reimbursements for SCIF employees, lost its license for failing to a file a tax return in 2008. Runzheimer accountants said they have been trying to resolve the issue for the past two years. They said their letters to California's Franchise Tax Board have gone unanswered.

This morning, the Assembly Committee on Accountability and Administrative Review will look at the impact of government cost-saving orders by Gov. Jerry Brown and his predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger. (Spoiler alert: A committee review found that tracking efficiency results has been spotty and that some of Schwarzenegger's initiatives didn't pan out as advertised.)

The committee will also hear from Los Angeles County CEO William T. Fujioka, who will talk about efficiency efforts there.

The committee is scheduled to convene at 9 a.m. in Room 447 in the state Capitol.
State and Local Government Efficiencies: Improving Efforts to Cut Costs

We mentioned in a post on Tuesday that today is the last day for most state employees to burn their 2010-11 Professional Development Days, although department mandates and some union contracts have caveats to that rule.

Here's a May 25 memo that outlines how CDCR is handling the policy for managers and rank and file. (Hat tip to Blog User J for passing it along.)
Requesting and Approving Professional Development Days

We mentioned on Monday that the state Department of Public Health has reported it suffered its second sensitive data breach in a year. That led us to ask, what has the department done to tighten its data security since last year?

The latest case involved someone copying files with names, addresses, Social Security numbers and other information on about 9,000 current and former employees onto a separate hard drive that was taken off state premises.

The first case happened last September when a Southern California field office mailed an unencripted computer tape. The opened envelope arrived at Sacramento HQ, but the tape containing sensitive information about 2,550 facility residents and employees, didn't.

There's been no known misuse of the information in either case.

We asked Public Health spokesman Al Lundeen what the department did after the tape was lost in the mail. Here's his e-mailed reply:

Gov. Jerry Brown avoided getting into many details about the budget that he and Democrats have agreed on, but a few newsy nuggets of interest to state workers did surface during his 15-minute press conference with reporters a few minutes ago.

For a broader look at Brown's comments on the budget and those of Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg and Assembly Speaker John A. Pérez, click here to pick up Torey Van Oot's report on Capitol Alert.

The deal includes no taxes, since among Republicans "there is an almost religious reluctance" to avoid them, Brown said.

The governor was ready to wheel and deal on public pensions, but even that couldn't pull up the GOP's political anti-tax anchor. "I have to say, the pension proposals ... my office had the language written," Brown told reporters. "That's all now tabled."

The Democrats plan to pass a budget that makes another $150 million in cuts to each of the state's university systems and more cuts to the judiciary. (Brown hinted the the state's massive courthouse building project would be put on hold.)

The universities could see yet another $100 million in cuts triggered if state revenues don't meet higher estimates in the new budget plan.

Brown also nixed selling state properties and then leasing them back, a holdover idea from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration that Brown rejected and then said he'd reconsider.

Sensitive information on about 9,000 current and former state employees was copied and removed from state offices, the California Department of Public Health has announced.

The security breach, the second to hit the department in a year, involves most current employees at the state Public Health and Health Care Services departments, and nearly 3,000 employees of the former Department of Health Services. The copied information included individual names and addresses, Social Security numbers, ethnicity, birth dates, compensation records, employees' next of kin and their addresses.

In a statement, CDPH Director Dr. Ron Chapman said, "We regret that the personal information of our employees was compromised. We take the breach of any secure documents very seriously and are committed to taking steps to minimize any impact of this action and further strengthen our security policy."

The department says that there's no evidence that the information has been misused, but it's still offering free credit monitoring to anyone caught up in the security lapse.

Someone tripped the department's security detection system on April 5 by copying the information to a private hard drive. CDPH investigators subsequently discovered that the hard drive was removed from state premises by an employee, according to the department press release. The employee, who was not named, is on administrative leave while the investigation continues.

Last Friday's announcement was the second time that Public Health officials have had to announce a personal information security breach. Last September a computer backup tape mailed from a Southern California field office never made it to department headquarters in Sacramento. The tape contained medical records and personal information of about 2,550 facility residents, staff and health care workers.

David Crane, an economic adviser and pension-change crusader in former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration, has been tapped to advise a task force "that will examine issues such as health-care costs and municipal borrowing practices," according to this story in the Wall Street Journal.

"Funding for the task force will come from several nonprofit foundations," the Journal reports, but it doesn't get into specifics.

The New York Times reports that former New York Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch and former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, both Democrats, are serving as co-chairmen for the group.

California is among the five states the task force will examine.

"The project will look into the causes of the current fiscal problems of the states, to what extent they are the result of the 2008 financial crisis, and to what extent they are structural. The difference is important because structural problems will not necessarily go away as soon as the economy picks up again," the Times reports.

The Journal has a bit more from Crane:

"States spend more on providing the services that really touch Americans--such as public education, health and welfare, infrastructure and transportation--than does the federal government yet no one knows their fiscal condition,'' Mr. Crane said in an email. "The task force will make transparent what now is opaque."

Other members of the advisory board include Nicholas F. Brady, Joseph Califano Jr., George P. Schulz and Richard Nathan.

Donald J. Boyd of the Rockefeller Institute of Government, based in Albany, N.Y., will lead the research.

PHOTO: David Crane (foreground) speaks to The Bee editorial board. Sacramento Bee file.

The bipartisan Little Hoover Commission has issued a report on Gov. Jerry Brown's proposal to merge the State Personnel Board and the Department of Personnel Administration. The 13-member commission cautioned, however, that that the big challenge for Brown's proposal is to change government's culture, not merely streamlining an organizational flow chart. (Click here for a recent State Worker column about the plan.)

Commission chairman Daniel Hancock (pictured right) summarizes that point in his introductory letter to the 32-page document:

Several elected state workers (A.K.A. legislators) aren't happy about Controller John Chiang's decision to cut off their pay and per diem for failing to submit a balanced budget by June 15 (see this Capitol Alert roundup of lawmakers' quotes for the range of reaction).

This blog is interested in what state employees think about the matter. Is this a delicious comeuppance for a group that hasn't felt budget impasse consequences before? Or is Chiang's decision really working against the interests of state employees?

David Kieffer, executive director of SEIU California told The Bee not long ago that if lawmakers didn't make taxes part of a solution to the state's $9.6 billion shortfall, he thought Brown and the Democrats should go back to budget gimmicks.

"Arnold (Schwarzenegger) didn't do every gimmick. ... There's a bottomless pit of gimmicks," Kieffer said.

From that perspective, Chiang's action unjustly punishes lawmakers and could lead to deeper cuts that wind up costing government jobs or lend momentum to more public pension rollbacks that Republicans want.

So how do you see it? We're considering writing our Thursday column about what state workers think. We'd love to hear from you. Take our poll, make your comments below and e-mail your thoughts to jortiz@sacbee.com and include your name and a contact phone if you'd like to be part of the column. We're all ears.

Last week this blog posted a public pension defense video by two labor groups, California Professional Firefighters and Californians for Retirement Security, that blasted pension reform proponent Marcia Fritz for using the phrase "tantamount to fiscal child abuse" during an Assembly committee hearing.

"The last place you want a benefit decision like this that impacts future generations, it's tantamount to fiscal child abuse, is what we've done," Fritz says in a California Channel video snippet of her May testimony.

Then the union video unloads on Fritz, who has become a prominent figure in the pension reform movement as president of the Citrus Heights-based California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility. (If you're not familiar with the foundation, this link opens up more than two dozen State Worker blog posts that mention the group.)

"Anyone in the public eye should not be demeaning the plight of victims. It goes against nature, what I see, wherein parents are inflicting violence and sexual abuse on chidren. and to compare that to a fiscal system, it's appalling," says Sarah Taylor, a social worker with Child Protective Services.

"For Marcia to use that type of language just sort of shows, A, what type of person she is," says Dave Low, chairman of Californians for Retirement Security, "and, B, what the real agenda here is. It's not to have a real dialogue about the issue, but it's just to inflame people's anger."

Fritz sent the following statement to The State Worker late Monday to rebut criticism of her remark. We're publishing her email here with her permission:

I testified on AB 961 (Mansoor), which would have prohibited collective bargaining for pension benefits. Teachers don't collectively bargain pension benefits, so how could THEY be offended by what I said and why were they even on the ad? Furthermore, nothing in my testimony was critical of labor in particular. I mentioned managers, labor negotiators, pension systems, and governing boards who all gain when benefit increases are granted to workers during collective bargaining. These decisions were harmful, improper, and abusive to our children who received nothing in return for the price they will be required to pay both in $ and in lower services.

Marcia Fritz, CPA
President
California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility

Click here for more information on AB 961, which failed to get out of the Assembly Committee on Public Employees, Retirement and Social Security.

IMAGE: Marcia Fritz testifies on Assembly Bill 961 before the Assembly Committee on Public Employees, Retirement and Social Security, May 4. Still image captured from California Channel video.

From today's Bee, in case you missed it:

Undaunted by allegations of fraud, CalPERS on Monday formally awarded a huge drug-benefit contract to CVS Caremark.

CalPERS chose Caremark even though the company is being sued by several former employees for allegedly defrauding the pension fund the last time it held the contract, nearly a decade ago.

Click here to check out the rest of the report by The Bee's Dale Kasler.

As we told you earlier this week, CalSTRS investment staff sent a letter to CalPERS investment staff encouraging them to hang in there amid a publicized scandal, a gifts probe and legislation that impacts the value of gifts that investment employees at either fund can accept and lengthens "revolving door" prohibitions should they leave for the private sector.

"These are difficult times," the June 1 letter says. "Defined benefit plans are under attack. Public employee pensions are in the spotlight and the financial markets are more volatile and challenging than ever before. Couple all of that with the burden of new rules and regulations, and it is apparent that it's getting harder and harder to simply do our jobs."

Here's the letter from CalSTRS to CalPERS. It was signed by nearly 70 CalSTRS investment staff. We've omitted those signatures as a security precaution:

The state has dumped 44 percent of its cellphone inventory, according to this report by The Bee's David Siders, but Gov. Jerry Brown wants to shut off more.

Here's a spreadsheet with a breakdown of cellphone inventory by department. Use the tool bar at the bottom of the embedded document to magnify or reduce the image. Look for more about Brown's war on cellphones in tomorrow's Bee.
California state cellphone inventory by department

So what's a "special fund department," anyway?

That's a key question that San Francisco's 1st District Court of Appeal wants answered as the June 15 date for oral arguments in SEIU v. Schwarzenegger approaches.

As we reported last week, the court asked the Gov. Jerry Brown's administration and SEIU Local 1000, to answer a series of questions. Several focused on figures provided by Veronica Chung-Ng, a finance employee who found that 30 of 69 departments SEIU orginally declared were "special fund" actually received no general fund money. She also found that 62 of the 69 had money that the general fund could borrow.

A few blog users have asked if we could dredge up Chung-Ng's data. We combed though a few dozen blog posts with links to court documents and finally turned up this item, which contains a link to the court filing with the Chung-Ng declaration and spreadsheet.

Here's how to find the court document (you'll need Java to download the file):

Click here to open the file on the court document server.
The Chung-Ng declaration and list of departments are contained in the 12 pages under file No. 16249126 in the list on left margin of the page. The spreadsheet that breaks down department funding starts on page 8.

The Fair Political Practices Commission and CalPERS Board of Administration President Rob Feckner have agreed that he failed to properly report two free meals that he received from fund partners, Feckner said in this Wednesday evening e-mail to The State Worker:

Just to give you the updated information I told you I would provide you. I have my final letter from the FPPC after clarifications and info sharing, the decision is that I now only have 2 infractions.

1 dinner with AEW, a partner in senior housing, in 2007
1 dinner with Goldman Sachs in 2008.

The others have been removed.

I have now signed the stipulation order and submitted payment for my $400 fine for 2 dinners in 5 years. I am putting this behind me and chalking it up to lessons learned.

The FPPC looked at Feckner's reporting records as part of a wider probe of gifts received by current and former CalPERS board members and employees. The investigation turned up 49 people with alleged violations, but it's not yet clear the degree of the infractions, since the commission hasn't released details of its investigation yet.

It's almost certain some of the allegations will dropped entirely or reduced. In Feckner's case, investigators thought he had failed to report four meals in five years. FPPC Executive Director Roman Porter declined to comment on the Feckner matter.

As we mention in today's State Worker column, Gov. Jerry Brown's plan to merge the Department of Personnel Administration and the State Personnel Board would eliminate DPA's Human Resources Modernization Project.

Dave Gilb launched "HR Mod" during his tenure as DPA's director. He envisioned a small team of employees focused on streamlining the state's cumbersome hiring process.

Brown tapped Gilb this year to help draw up the DPA/SPB merger plan. Among the contributors: Gilb's successor at DPA, Debbie Endsley; Marty Morgenstern, secretary of the Labor and Workforce Development Agency; current DPA director Ron Yank; and Suzanne Ambrose, executive officer of the State Personnel Board.

But given that the merger would mean the demise of a project he envisioned, we e-mailed Gilb and asked if HR Mod met his expectations and whether Brown's reorganization proposal continues the goal of modernizing state HR. Here's what he said:

Gov. Jerry Brown plans to close 70 state parks and historic sites, but the impact shouldn't cost current permanent employees their jobs, according to the the union that represents park rangers and California's parks director -- assuming the state gets the tax revenues Brown wants.

The California Statewide Law Enforcement Association said that its representatives talked with the Department of Parks and Recreation about the shutdowns in March.

"At that time, DPR represented that no layoffs of full-time bargaining unit members were contemplated. However, if the tax extension sought by the Governor was not obtained and more drastic cuts were implemented, layoffs would be likely," the union said on its website.

California State Parks Director Ruth Coleman said the department is expected to lose about 200 permanent positions, though most of those will come from eliminating some of the department's roughly 500 vacant posts.

"We're going to have to eliminate those positions and then move people around," Coleman said last week to Capitol Bureau reporter Torey Van Oot. "The layoff process will be initiated... but whether or not people at the end of the day will be unemployed, we're hoping not. We hope that we can save all of our permanent staff."

The state's layoff program allows senior employees whose positions are eliminated to displace junior colleagues in similar jobs, so it's likely that some park staff will have to move to continue working for the government.

"That can be very destructive to a lot of people because it's hard to move across the state if you have a spouse with a different job or things like that," Coleman said, "so I don't want to understate the challenge this is going to pose to our staff and the difficulty they are going to experience."

PHOTO: The California Governor's mansion, one of 70 state parks and historic sites slated for closure by Gov. Jerry Brown. Sacramento Bee file / Jose Luis Villegas

Assembly Republicans have rolled out their own budget proposal, which, according to this report by Bee Capitol Bureau colleague Kevin Yamamura, includes a 10 percent cut to the state's employee costs:

Several of the GOP ideas would be highly contentious. It is hard to see how Democrats would slash state worker compensation by anything close to 10 percent after employees agreed to some concessions in new contracts within the last year. Assembly Republicans did not outline specific cuts but suggested the state could pursue layoffs or ramp up health care costs.

The story, posted on Capitol Alert, includes a link to the GOP proposal.

Is former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's chief pension change advocate getting smeared by the unions? He thinks so.

David Crane, who was an economic adviser and big-time pension system critic in the Schwarzenegger administration, tells The State Worker that it's "painfully ironic" that he has been taken to task as a public employee basher.

That charge is among several outlined on DontScapegoatUs.com, a Californians for Secure Retirement website that skewers Crane and several other public figures (sporting digitized goat horns) who have called for changes to the system. Crane is referred to as the "Scapegoater-in-Chief."

Here's the rest of what Crane's emailed rebuttal, sent via Aaron McLear, Schwarzenegger's former press secretary. (McLear recently launched a Sacramento-based communications consulting firm, the Ginsberg McLear Group, with Josh Ginsberg, Schwarzenegger's political director.)

CalPERS will begin metal detection and x-ray screening of visitors and their personal items during next week's three-day board meeting at the fund's Sacramento headquarters, according to an emailed memo issued Monday:

Increasing security measures during Board meetings is an important part of enhancing security at Lincoln Plaza. Visitor screening is a standard practice at other public meetings such as the Sacramento City Council, San Francisco Board of Supervisors and Los Angeles City Council and implementing these new security measures for Board meetings is also consistent with the recommendations made by our security consultant.

CalPERS also is contracting with the California Highway Patrol for board meeting security.

The memo, which you can read here, notes that the fund has been giving more attention to facility security for the last year. Fund spokesman Brad Pacheco told The State Worker that the new measures will cost about $150,000 per year, plus a bit more to install cameras in the auditorium where the board holds meetings.

"It's important in today's environment that we take these extra precautionary steps to protect our employees and visitors to our meetings," Pacheco said.

PHOTO: CalPERS Sacramento headquarters. File photo / Sacramento Bee

Gov. Jerry Brown's office has announced a plan to merge the Department of Personnel Administration and the State Personnel Board into the California Department of Human Resources. The new acronym: CalHR. Projected savings from the merger: $5.8 million.

Bee colleague Torey Van Oot has more on The Bee's Capitol Alert blog.

Here's the press release.

State Controller John Chiang's office contacted The State Worker on Monday with a rebuttal to a statement we published last week by CalPERS board member J.J. Jelincic stating his opposition to Senate Bill 439, which would lower limits on gifts to CalPERS and CalSTRS board members and employees to $50.

Jelincic had prepared the remarks but didn't get to read them at last week's Senate Committee on Elections and Constitutional Ethics hearing. He believes that the measure would force employees to pay for business meals out of pocket, since state per diem isn't enough to cover those expenses and CalPERS' partners or potential partners wouldn't be allowed to pick up the tab.

The measure was put on the committee's consent calendar and moved to the Senate Appropriations Committee on a 5-0 vote without testimony for or against it.

Appropriations is supposed to take up the measure on Monday.

Chiang, who sponsored the legislation, is an ex-officio member of both the CalPERS and CalSTRS boards. Here's his response to Jelincic's criticisms:

California's state and local government employees' pay is roughly equal to counterparts' salaries in the private sector, but pension and health benefits push public workers' total compensation costs about 10 percent higher, a new report says.

The two-part study, commissioned by the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility , also cautions that public pension obligations threaten to crowd out money for public services. The foundation, headed by long-time pension change advocate Marcia Fritz, has proposed several pension cost-cutting ideas including a cap on pension payouts, higher employee contributions and higher retiree health premiums. The proposals would affect both current workers and future hires.

The study by Sacramento-based Capitol Matrix Consulting estimates the impact of those proposals on various employees based on length of service and whether they are safety or miscellaneous workers. Nearly every scenario envisions deep cuts to employee benefits and employer costs.

Steve Maviglio, spokesman for union coalition Californians for Secure Retirement, blasted the report, its authors and the foundation. "The report is a political document that relies on outdated and skewed data that provides an inaccurate view of retirement benefits for public employees," he said this morning in an e-mail.

CalPERS CEO Anne Stausboll issued a statement this afternoon that said the fund is reviewing the report, but "what we have seen reported raises significant policy and legal questions. We will closely examine the research, methodology and implications through the lens of our role to provide retirement security and health benefits for our members and their families."

As we mentioned in our profile on Sundayof CalPERS' board member J.J. Jelincic, the former garbage man with a master's degree doesn't like Senate Bill 439. The measure, officially supported by the fund's board, cuts the value of gifts that fund employees can receive from the current $420 annually to $50.

Jelincic abstained when every other board member voted in support of the bill. He says he opposes it -- at least in its current form -- because it would force fund employees traveling on business to open their own wallets to pay for meals, since the state per diem isn't enough to cover breakfasts, lunches or dinners in, say, New York.

He took vacation time Tuesday, intending to testify before the Senate Elections and Constitutional Amendments Committee, but the measure was put on the consent calendar and no testimony was taken.

The State Worker asked Jelincic what he would have said. In response, he e-mailed his prepared remarks. With his permission we're posting them here, unedited:

The Department of Motor Vehicles has expanded its self-service kiosk program, according to a press announcement released last week. The ATM-style machines are now available in two dozen field offices in four counties. If you haven't seen how the machines work, click the viewer above.

The goal, the press release says, "to get vehicle registration stickers and cards into customers' hands in a few minutes or less."

The DMV program reminded us of when the retail grocery industry a few years ago launched self-service checkout stands in stores. It was a controversial addition, at least for the grocery employee union locals in California that worried the machines were taking jobs from their members.

The supermarket chains saw customer self-service as a way to cut employee costs in a fiercely competitive industry that lives and dies on razor-thin profit margins. It was a logical extension of a trend that started years earlier when banks added ATMs as a way to shift labor costs to customers and machines while enhancing service speed.

Since then banks, retailers and government also have exploited the Internet to automate transactions that were formerly face-to-face, mailed in or handled over the phone. The trade-off is the same: less input work and cost for the institution, more input work and convenience for the customer.

What do you think? Is self-service government technology a creeping threat to state jobs? A vital path to providing services more cheaply? Somewhere in between?

The rate at which state workers drew their first pension checks in the first four months of this year slowed dramatically compared with the same period in 2010, according to CalPERS most recent data.

Some 4,271 state employees put in their retirement applications between Dec. 15 of last year and April 15 of this year (which CalPERS considers the January through April period), up just 3.6 percent from a year earlier. By contrast, the retirement rate for those same four months jumped 26.5 percent from 2009 to 2010.

Last year was perhaps the most tumultuous period for California's state work force since union organization was established during Gov. Jerry Brown's first administration more than 30 years ago. Furloughs, minimum wage threats, contentious labor negotiations, layoff warnings and epic court and public relations fights with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger damaged morale and no doubt prodded many state workers to retire who might have stayed under less contentious circumstances.

The number of state workers who retired in March fell slightly compared to the same month in 2010, while April saw a slight year-over-year increase of first-time pensioners.

The overall upward retirement trend will continue as more and more baby boomers in the state work force grow old enough to retire. But the data also suggest that state workers aren't going to continue an all-out stampede for the exits, a likely bi-product of the relative labor peace under the new Brown administration and the weak prospect for post-retirement jobs in the private sector.

Peel away the legalese, and a 62-page lawsuit in Sacramento comes down to this accusation: Prison Receiver J. Clark Kelso -- with help from a federal judge, the state court administrative system and CalPERS -- is spiking his state pension with his federal salary.

Daniel E. Francis v. CalPERS contends that Kelso's employment agreement illegally washes his pay through the state Administrative Office of the Courts so that the money can be factored into his CalPERS pension. Kelso has said the arrangement, while unusual, is above board and legal.

Francis is a retired state worker and therefore a CalPERS member.

The Bee reported last year that when federal judge Thelton Henderson appointed Kelso to take over the state prison system's medical program in 2008, the California Prison Healthcare Receivership Corporation, the non-profit business arm of the receiver, and the AOC agreed to put Kelso on the AOC payroll.

Technically, Kelso is on loan to the federal court. The receivership corporation reimburses the AOC for Kelso's pay and benefits. Ultimately, the state pays the receivership's costs.

Kelso has worked in various capacities for the state, so he was in CalPERS before taking the receiver job. In an interview with The Bee last year, he was open about his AOC employment agreement and his desire to remain in CalPERS while working as a federal court appointee. He said that the arrangement was legally vetted and doesn't break any laws.

At least one former state employee who was already working for the nonprofit when Kelso came onboard, Linda Buzzini, tried and failed to get her pay retroactively applied to her CalPERS retirement.

The plaintiff wants the court to revoke Kelso's CalPERS membership as an employee of the AOC.

Here's the court filing:

From our sister blog, Capitol Alert:

Gov. Jerry Brown today issued an executive order banning state employee travel that is "not mission-critical."

The order targets all in- and out-of-state travel that costs the state money and is not "directly related to enforcement responsibilities, audits, revenue collection or other duties required by statute, contract or executive directive."

Capitol Bureau colleague Torey Van Oot has the story and the executive order, which you can read by clicking here.

There's been a bit of a buzz at CalPERS and CalSTRS the last few weeks over Assembly Bill 873, which would set new limits on the funds' board members and employees after they sever ties with either organization.

In a petition and letter to SEIU Local 1000 President Yvonne Walker last month, CalSTRS employees asked the union to intervene. They called the measure an employee morale killer that legitimizes "indentured servitude" and will make it harder to recruit sharp investment managers. And, the petition says, that will carry untold costs to the funds in lower returns on investments.

CalPERS employees are gathering signatures on a similar petition.

Controller John Chiang is sponsoring the bill as way to shut the revolving door that exposed CalPERS to ethical -- and quite possibly criminal -- breaches detailed in the Steptoe Report that CalPERS commissioned and then released earlier this year.

Specifically, the measure would:

• Extend from two years to four years the ban on state employer lobbying on CalPERS and CalSTRS board members, executives, senior investment officers, general counsels, and senior managers in the health benefits and investment divisions.
• Prohibit for two years designated CalPERS and CalSTRS board members and senior staff from helping a new employer on any contracts with CalPERS or CalSTRS if they had contract dealings valued above $10 million with their new employer in the two years prior to their separation.
• Ban for 10 years former board members and designated fund staff from accepting compensation as a placement agent for providing services in connection with CalPERS or CalSTRS.

The fund staff opposing the measure say that it punishes the very employees who can help bring abuses to light. From talking with sources, The State Worker's best guess is that the bill could impact post-fund careers of a combined 300 to 400 board members and staff at the two agencies.

Chiang is an ex officio member of both CalPERS and CalSTRS. His spokesman, Jacob Roper, said Tuesday afternoon that the controller's office met with staff and board members at both agencies and that the bill has their support.

Our best guess after talking to sources at both funds is that between 300 and 400 people would be affected by the measure should it become law.

As of this morning, there was no online legislative analysis of the bill authored by Assemblyman Warren Furutani, D-Gardena, but here's an AB 873 fact sheet sent to The State Worker by Roper:

Point of View blog posts publish thoughtful, provocative e-mails sent to The State Worker.

State employee George Baldini sent an e-mail last week in response to Poll: Will state hire more school inspectors?

With the author's permission, we're publishing the unedited e-mail here. He speaks for himself, not his union or employer:

We never get all of what we learn into a news story, but this blog can give users the notes and quotes from the notebook that informed what was published.

Our story in Tuesday's Bee looked at recent office moves planned by Board of Equalization members Jerome Horton and George Runner. Horton's intended move from the 9th floor of the U.S. Bank Tower to the same building's 25th story didn't happen. Runner's move from the Wells Fargo Center to the Bank of the West Tower is still on after he whacked the board's improvement costs in half.

After you've read the story for context, check out these documents for more details about Runner's move:

The Feb. 24 estimates of tenant improvement costs beyond what the landlord would cover for the 17th floor of the Bank of the West Tower.

The Nov. 4 letter from the BOE's Christine Demes to James Koerner at DGS to arrange a tour of 500 Capitol Mall for Runner and asking that the former senator not pay for parking when he arrives there.

A Dec. 3 letter from Demes to Koerner about cutting costs by moving desks from other parts of 500 Capitol Mall instead of having desks built.

A Mar. 8 revision of tenant improvement costs. (Runner has since cut another $14,000.)

The unexecuted lease agreement for 500 Capitol Mall.

We never get all of what we learn into a news story, but this blog can give users the notes and quotes from the notebook that informed what was published.

Our story in today's Bee looks at recent office moves planned by Board of Equalization members Jerome Horton and George Runner. Horton's intended move from the 9th floor of the U.S. Bank Tower to a top spot on the same building's 25th story is dead. Runner's move from the Wells Fargo Center to the Bank of the West Tower is on, after he cut costs and spread payments for part of the upgrades over four years of the eight-year lease.

After you've read the story for context, check out these documents for more details about the Horton plan:

Building improvement costs for the 25th floor of the U.S. Bank Tower

The Feb. 24 e-mail from Patti Joseph, DGS' Sacramento leasing manager, raising questions about the cost of the office space improvements. Includes Feb. 28 response from Liz Houser, BOE deputy director of administration that costs are reasonable and the improvements are "necessary for program operations."

The Mar. 10 e-mail from Houser that says the improvement costs are "not acceptable."

The unexecuted lease that the state declined to sign for the top floor space at U.S. Bank Tower.

We'll post some Runner documents later.

The five-member Senate Committee on Public Employment and Retirement passed Senate Bill 151 on a 3-2 party-line vote this afternoon. The brief hearing was the first step toward legislatively adopting six state employee contracts negotiated last month with Gov. Jerry Brown's administration.

Chairwoman Sen. Gloria Negrete McLeod, D-Chino, supported the bill. Sen. Alex Padilla D-Los Angeles and Sen. Juan Vargas, D-San Diego joined her.

Republican Sen. Ted Gaines of Roseville and Sen. Mimi Walters, R-Laguna Niguel, opposed.

The meeting lacked any drama. Schduled for 2 p.m., the hearing started 90 minutes late, and then with only Negrete McLeod present. She listened as representatives of the unions made one- or two-sentence public declarations supporting the bills. No opponents stepped forward.

The other committee members eventually joined the meeting, cast their votes on the bill with no debate, heard a handful of bills, voted on them and then left to go back to the Senate floor.

Union representatives at the hearing said that they don't expect the bill to get to a floor vote before the Legislature goes on a week-long break next week. It needs two-thirds support in both the Senate and Assembly to pass. To reach that threshold, two Republicans in each chamber will have to vote for the bill.

A state Assembly committee has unanimously approved a measure that requires state agencies and departments immediately sever contracts that the State Personnel Board disapproves. Departments that ignore the SPB's decisions would risk the rejection of future contracts for same or similar services.

The Committee on Business, Professions and Consumer Protection on Tuesday voted 8-0 on Assembly Bill 740 by Assemblyman Bob Blumenfield, D-Woodland Hills. the measure now goes to the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

The Department of Personnel Administration, which represents Gov. Jerry Brown in contract negotiations, has put out a press release on the deal reached this morning with the California Correctional Peace Officers Association:

A CalPERS committee has recommended the fund continue assuming its investments will return 7.75 percent, The Bee's Dale Kasler reports. Lowering the rate would cost employers in the system kick in more money and, as we reported here, would increase the cost of "air time" for individual members.

Click here for the story. Here's the fund's press release.

Editor's note, 11:04 a.m.: A previous version of this post contained a link to the CalPERS report that some users reported was broken. We have replaced the link.

In this morning's Bee:

The bribery scandal at CalPERS likely cost the pension fund tens of millions of dollars in inflated fees, a lawyer hired by CalPERS to investigate the case said Monday.

Washington lawyer Philip Khinda, in a report to the California Public Employees' Retirement System board, said former "placement agent" Alfred Villalobos corrupted top pension fund officials, notably former Chief Executive Fred Buenrostro, to steer investments to his clients.

Khinda named four other CalPERS officials close to Villalobos: former board members Charles Valdes, Kurato Shimada and the late Robert Carlson, and former investment officer Leon Shahinian.

Click here for Dale Kasler's story. Here's CalPERS' press release about the report. This link opens a CalPERS' Q&A about it. This link opens a copy of the report.

Our Wednesday report on a proposal by Professional Engineers in California Government to end furloughs for its members -- and more than offset the increased payroll costs by axing contracted private engineers -- prompted a rebuttal from an organization that represents private engineering firms in the state.

PECG's says its plan would save the state $336 million, or about $80 million more than Brown's target for savings from negotiated union concessions. The Department of Personnel Administration didn't go for the idea, so PECG took it directly to the Legislature.

Here's what Paul Meyer, executive director of the American Council of Engineering Companies, California, said in an e-mail about PECG's cost calculations:

A new study of 126 state retirement systems concludes that their combined ratio of pension assets-to-liabilities, the so-called "funding ratio," rose to 69 percent in 2010, up from 65 percent a year earlier.

Or you can look at it the other way: State pension funds are 31 percent unfunded. Generally speaking, experts consider an 80 percent funding ratio the threshold for a healthy system.

Santa Monica-based Wilshire Consulting published the report, which focuses on pension funds in the aggregate and doesn't break out individual retirement systems. It did include numbers from CalPERS, CalSTRS and the UC retirement system, however.

For folks who get into how funds spread their money around, the investment consulting firm's report gets into asset allocation data.

Wilshire forecasts the plans' long-term median return will be 6.5 percent, which is 1.5 percent below the funds' median actuarial interest rate assumption of 8 percent. The higher the assumed rate, the greater the discount on what government employers pay to the funds.

(Our Capitol Bureau colleague, Kevin Yamamura, explains the different schools of thought when it comes to this key assumption in in today's Bee.)

Here's the Wilshire report:
2011 Wilshire Report on State Retirement Systems: Funding Levels and Asset Allocation

With last Friday's deadline pushed back for Gov. Jerry Brown to announce two lists of suggested government spending cuts, TechLeader TV blogger and broadcaster John Thomas Flynn has his own list of information technology cuts. Together, he says, they amount to about $5 billion in savings:

• Eliminate $1.8 billion Financial Information System for California (FI$Cal) Project
• Terminate California Court Case Management System (CCMS) immediately - Savings: $1.5 billion
• Intensify fraud and waste investigations of Medi-cal and other state benefit and revenue programs - Savings: $1.5 billion
• Re-examine IT scope, schedules, and procurement strategy, even canceling several non-performing projects could easily shave 10-20%. Savings: $500 million+.

Click here for Flynn's analysis on the TechLeader.TV blog.

Half of U.S. state governments overestimated their revenues by at least 10 percent in 2009, according to a new report by the Pew Center for the States, with serious consequences to budgets because the projections shape spending, cutting and tax policy priorities.

"States' Revenue Estimating: Cracks in the Crystal Ball," looks at what states estimated they would take in income taxes, sales taxes and corporate taxes from 1987 to 2009 and found that

• Errors in revenue estimates have worsened progressively during the fiscal crises that have followed the past three economic downturns. Between 1990 and 1992, a quarter of the states had errors of 5 percent or more. In 2001 and 2003, nearly half the states were off by 5 percent or more. In 2009, almost three in four states missed the mark by 5 percent or more.
• 2009, the first full fiscal year of the Great Recession, ended with the largest overestimates in revenue forecasting of any year studied. This translated to a roughly $50 billion shortfall that states had to cover.
• Unique among past downturns, the Great Recession was also notable for major declines in all three major state taxes, which comprise 72 percent of states' total tax revenues.

Here's the report:
States' Revenue Estimating: Cracks in the Crystal Ball

Union reactions to today's Little Hoover Commission pension report and proposals have started rolling in. Here's what Professional Engineers in California Government says:

"The Little Hoover Commission is recommending something that it admits the courts have already determined is illegal and would violate the promise that government made to its public servants when they were hired," said Bruce Blanning, PECG Executive Director.

The report also concludes that putting in lower benefits for new hires "will not deliver savings for a generation."

Blanning added, "All surveys show that public servants are paid less than their private sector counterparts. The Legislature and Governor should direct their focus to legitimate savings rather than illegally violating long-standing commitments to those who serve the public."

PECG represents 13,000 state-employed engineers and related professionals responsible for designing and inspecting California's highways and bridges, ensuring that schools and hospitals are safe during earthquakes, and protecting our air, water and beaches from polluters.

And here's the statement from California Association of Professional Scientists:

Still haven't had enough about how much the state has spent on cell phones and computer aircards? You're in luck. Here are a few spreadsheets from the Department of General Services that show the 2010 number of wireless lines serviced by Verizon and Sprint, the two largest carriers, and the trends going back to 2005-06:

Summary of 2010 Sprint and Verizon wireless lines, by department
Verizon historical line totals and costs, summary and by department
Sprint historical line totals and costs, summary and by department

The Bee reported last week that about 25 percent of the 54,000 or so state wireless lines audited so far were unused in December at a cost to government of more than $300,000.

The state Office of Technology has been looking at the issue for more than a year, long before Gov. Jerry Brown said he wanted departments to cut their phone inventories by 50 percent. The results, according to Validas, a Texas-based a mobility service advising firm, was $2.6 million saved from using wireless devices more efficiently and negotiating lower-priced rates.

Here's the Validas report:
State of California Wireless Savings Report: January 27, 2011

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees says that California should find new "revenue opportunities" and could save more than $34 billion per year by dumping private contractors who do jobs that government employees could do for less.

"That's the amount that Sacramento spends every year paying private contractors to do jobs that civil servants can perform for roughly half the cost," says AFSCME's press release, which was issued this morning.

AFSCME says it culled those ideas and others from surveying the 180,000 workers it represents in various levels of California government. The union now wants to form "workplace-level, labor-management efficiency teams" to find and capture ways for government to save money.

Besides raising revenues and curtailing outside contracts, AFSCME says government should do more of the following:

Michigan's new Republican Gov. Rick Snyder is pushing to cut state employee compensation, arguing that the state work force is overpaid relative to what private sector workers earn. Late last month his office released a 25-page document on state spending, "Dollars and Sense: How State and Local Governments in Michigan Spend Your Money." Click here to download it.

The booklet includes a brief section, starting on page 12, about the the cost of local and state government employees and public school teachers, then narrows the compensation focus to state employees versus private sector employees and concludes:

In 2000, average public sector compensation was 55% higher than average private sector compensation. In 2009, state classified employee compensation was 113% higher, on average, than the private sector. However, this analysis does not compare private and public sector employees with similar jobs, years of experience or education.

While the first sentence seemed to get all of the attention for a few days, the second sentence can't be ignored. A few days later, a study released by Jeffrey H. Keefe, associate professor of labor and employment relations at the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers University. drew a different conclusion. Here's the intro to "Are Michigan State Workers Overcompensated?"

This item first posted on Jan. 31, but we're bringing it back so that State Worker blog users can see the results now that item has been pushed off the home page.

Gov. Jerry Brown has ordered the state's vehicle fleet slashed and new vehicle purchases stopped. The mandate followed an earlier edict that government agencies and departments cut the number of cell phones issued to state workers.

(By the way, here's a perspective on Brown's phone recall by John Thomas Flynn of TechLeader.TV: "Jerry Brown, Cell Phones and the Law of Unintended Consequences.")

We're always interested in gauging what this blog's users think about these sorts of policies. Hence today's poll question:

After his State of the State speech Monday, Gov. Jerry Brown took media questions. Bee colleague and Capitol Alert blogger Torey Van Oot passed along her notes from the scrum about what the governor said when asked whether he would make more "symbolic" cuts, like his cell phone recall or state vehicle executive order.

"I think streamlining the state is more than symbolic," Brown said. "There are agencies that can be merged and layers that can be eliminated and I'm working on that."

When will Brown detail those mergers and consolidations? If recent history serves, he'll do it when it gives him maximum political impact.

One of Brown's political strengths is his sense of timing. When he ran for governor last year, he defied calls within his own party to fire back early at Republican Meg Whitman's multimillion-dollar negative ad campaign. His eventual win was a political tortoise-and-the-hare story (with help from Whitman's "nannygate" debacle). Brown knew that in politics the finish is more important than the start.

Now he's up against Reeps who are insisting early on that Brown's tax extension plan is a no go. Dems aren't happy with his planned cuts.

But rather than getting bogged down in a word war (remember Schwarzenegger's famous "girlie man" remark?), Brown going back to his tortoise strategy. So look for more cost-cutting announcements to trickle out of the administration over the coming weeks as the governor seeks to burnish his cost-cutter credentials -- and pressure members of his own party and Republicans on the other side to leave their comfort zones.

A Santa Barbara-based organization that wants to end union representation of California government employees has revved up its campaign contribution collection machinery for a run at putting the idea to a statewide vote.

Although Secretary of State records indicate that Californians for Public Union Reform hasn't reported that it has taken in any money yet -- it just filed with the state last week -- it is positioning itself to accept contributions with an aim toward putting an initiative on the ballot next year.

Lanny Ebenstein, UC Santa Barbara economist, head of the California Center for Public Policy and president of the Santa Barbara County Taxpayers Association is named in the state filing as the reform group's treasurer.

If his name seems familiar, it's probably because Ebenstein authored "Reforming Public Employee Compensation and Pensions." a report that purported to show that California public employees' pay and benefits are "unjust." We told you about the report in this blog post.

The state Department of Finance has issued the rules and forms for departments to inventory and turn in cell phones in keeping with Gov. Jerry Brown's Jan. 11 executive order to slash state-issued cell phones by 50 percent.

We've embedded the budget letter below. Click the following links for the detailed instructions and forms that departments are supposed to use to carry out Brown's order.

Cellular Device Inventory Reduction Instructions
Cellular Device Inventory Reduction Worksheet
Request for Cellular Device Exemption
Budget Letter 11 02: Cellular Phone Reductions

As reported less than an hour ago on The Bee's Capitol Alert blog, Gov. Jerry Brown has ordered the state's vehicle fleet reduced and has placed a moratorium on new state vehicle purchases. Click here to read the order.

Gov. Jerry Brown has just issued an order to reduce the state vehicle fleet and to stop purchasing new cars. Bee colleague David Siders has more on our sister blog, Capitol Alert.

On his way out the door, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger issued a controversial pardon and a high-profile thumb-in-your-eye appointment to the UC Board of Regents. But have you heard about Cameron Percy?

Schwarzenegger appointed Percy to a spot on the CalSTRS board (compensation: $100 per diem) in December, as Gov. Jerry Brown's website notes. At 26, Percy has a graduate degree from Stanford and business experience with a couple of companies.

As a Stanford grad student, Percy helped author "Going For Broke: Reforming California's Public Employee Pension Systems," which Schwarzenegger and Co. referenced as a source for the oft-cited and highly disputed calculation that California's Big Three pension systems faced a collective $500 billion in unfunded liabilities.

CalSTRS' piece of that, according to the year-old study: $156.7 billion. Fund officials have said that's an overestimation.

(The fund says it had $146.4 billion in assets the end of 2010. Figures posted on its website show that its funding level was 78 percent as of June 30, 2009, but STRS has made investment gains since then. Generally, 80 percent funding is considered the threshold for healthy public pension systems -- although that rule of thumb, like most things about public pensions, has been a topic of debate.)

The Senate has a year to confirm Percy's appointment. We called Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg's office and asked when the Rules Committee might take it up. Spokesman Nathan Barankin said there's no firm date yet: "But governors make their own decisions about appointments. Anyone can be yanked with the stroke of a pen."

IMAGE: www.freefoto.com

SEIU Local 1000 has asked to join the legal fight to keep the state from selling 11 properties that former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger put on the sales block to help close California's budget deficit. Gov. Jerry Brown criticized the plan when he was running for office, but earlier this month said that he is weighing whether to continue the previous administration's sale lease-back plan because ending the deal would increase the state's budget gap by about $1 billion.

As the union notes in the amicus brief (embedded below) filed in the 6th District Court of Appeal in San Jose, state custodians would lose their jobs if the building sale goes through because the buyer, California First LLC, intends to use private sector employees to perform those duties.

Meanwhile, the state has pushed back the layoff date for employees affected by the pending sale. Originally their positions were set for elimination on March 30. The new date is May 1. (Click here for a previous post about the pending layoffs.)

Fans of William Shakespeare will appreciate union attorney Anne Giese's reference to "King Lear" to fortify her argument that the sale is illegal, and foolish to boot:

Since the actions of Schwarzenegger -- during repeated budget crises -- frequently appeared like tragedies of Shakespearean proportions, it is fitting, then, to compare his poor real estate decisions to those of King Lear.

You can read the rest of her analogy here. Scroll down to PDF page 9:

A new policy brief from the Legislative Analyst's Office puts meat on the bones of Gov. Jerry Brown's broad-stroke 2011-12 budget plan to cut a total of 7 percent of state funding to California's court system, a decrease of $272 million.

Among the LAO's suggestions to cut costs (listed in the table above): transition to electronic court reporting, allow private firms to bid for court security services and use more contract court interpreters.

Here's the eight-page policy brief:

The Legislative Analyst's Office has taken a look a pension bill that was key to last year's budget deal and concluded that it was well-intentioned but flawed.

Senate Bill 867, authored by Republican Dennis Hollingsworth and backed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, established several new public reporting requirements and, most significantly, told CalPERS to make estimates of its unfunded liabilities based on the so-called "zero-risk rate."

The LAO concluded that the bill has "serious drafting problems" that make it needlessly alarmist or unworkable:

As part of its efforts to encourage scrutiny of CalPERS' investment return assumptions, SB 867 requires CalPERS to calculate pension liabilities in its reports to the Legislature and others using "a discount rate equal to the rate of the 10-year United States Treasury (UST) Note as of 30 days before the date of the report." This means that instead of calculating liabilities using CalPERS' annual assumed investment return (currently 7.75 percent), this report would require liability reporting assuming a much lower discount rate. As of January 21, 2010, the 10-year UST yield is 3.4 percent. Using such a lower discount rate would result in CalPERS calculating a much higher amount of liabilities and, therefore, future state and local costs, compared to standard public pension reporting methods.

Assemblyman Mike Eng, D-Monterey Park, has brought back a bill that would force state agencies to list all personal services contracts, including those for information technology and engineering, on a user-friendly Website.

The measure, AB 172, aims to boost state government's business transparency. SEIU Local 1000 supports the measure as one way to expose costly outsourcing deals that cost the state more money than if the jobs were performed by state employees.

Eng's bill would require each state agency report its outside contracting for consulting and services to the Department of Finance, which would then pass it on to the Legislature. The measure includes a business "death penalty":

We can never get everything we learn into a news story. "From the notebook" posts give you some of the extra details behind the news.

Our story in Friday's Bee looked at the likelihood that the number of California state workers will decrease in the coming fiscal year, assuming that elements of Gov. Jerry Brown's budget proposal eventually become law.

Several readers have asked about the history of the state workforce. How much has it grown or shrunk over time? What about the ratio of state workers to California's population?

The answers to those questions can be found in Schedule 6 of Brown's budget plan, on PDF page 193. We've embedded pertinent table below. As you look at the numbers, remember that they include state workers outside of gubernatorial authority.

The print is small. To enlarge the table, click the magnifying glass on the tool bar at the bottom of the viewer. To see the entire page, click the linked title above the viewer.

California's state employee corps, residents and state expenditures

Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg wants to clear out California's regulatory deadwood. Here's part of what The Bee's Susan Ferriss wrote after a 90-minute conversation with the Sacramento Democrat today:

In an interview with The Bee Capitol Bureau, Steinberg said he'll propose "urgency legislation that directs each state agency to review its regulations, identify any duplicative, archaic or inconsistent rules."

Steinberg said lawmakers could then act on the recommendations over the next six months, perhaps expunging some rules from the 5,000-page California Code of Regulations as part of the state budget negotiations.

Click here to read Susan's report on the Capitol Alert blog, which she's fleshing out for a more expansive story in tomorrow's fiber/cyber Bee.

Our Thursday State Worker column in the fiber and cyber Bee looked at the range of state workers' reaction to Gov. Jerry Brown's order to cut the number of state cell phones by at least half.

This post is the third of three that publishes the state workers' e-mails and interviews behind the column. Click here for the first post and click here for part 2.

I do not have a State phone so I have no personal iron in this fire ...

This seems a terribly silly way to try to squeeze a couple of dollars out of the budget.

Taken to the extreme - we could eliminate all of those expensive computers that the State Employees use on the job ... go back to carbon paper and typewriters.

ALSO ... if one assumes that half of the eliminated cell phones are still under Contract .... Will that mean the State will have to pay Early Termination fees ???

24,000 phones times $175 = about $ 4.2 million.

I believe it is a silly and ill advised means of economizing ....

Sadly ... I think Jerry is showing his age on this one.

Gov. Jerry Brown has started with a cell phone crackdown and has promised to go after state cars and to examine whether the state has misclassified some state workers as peace officers.

So what other drawers need to be pulled open in the state closet to start cleaning up clutter that is needlessly costing big government bucks? Leave your comments below. We're not talking about whether pensions need cutting, or whether pay should be pared back. That stuff is endlessly debated. We're talking about those "little" things that, when added together, can save millions -- like cell phones.

PHOTO: www.freefoto.com

With just 400 to 450 words for our Thursday State Worker column, much of what we learn in the ramp-up to writing it never sees print. Column Extras give you some of the notes, the quotes and the observations that don't make the cut.

Gov. Jerry Brown's order Tuesday to cut in half the number of state-issued cell phones has been a big topic of conversation among state workers this week. On Wednesday we solicited e-mails and from state workers and followed them with phone calls. We also talked with employees outside the Capitol about Brown's crackdown. All that correspondence and conversation produced today's State Worker column in The Bee.

Here are some of the comments and e-mails from state workers. We're planning to post more later today and on Friday.

Jon,

This is a good starting point for the new governor. Lets get rid of the cell phones. But in one of our meetings (an executive) already told us that he is asking his legal office to review the Executive Order and find the language to get around it ... He wants the language he needs to use in the justification to keep the cell phones. I can tell you that in most offices we could get rid of 70% of our phones without jeopardizing the work we do and without jeopardizing staff safety. But once again the deputy directors that are here from the last administration are going on the offensive to keep everything they have. These appointees are traveling from Sacramento to Southern CA like it's running out of style.

The question is will the governor consolidate, eliminate and tackle the big ticket items like, boards, commissions, and departments. This governor just like the last governor ONLY has one chance. If he goes in June asking us for tax increase (or to keep them the same) without making any changes to the boards, commissions, and departments his initiative WILL FAIL. The voters in CA are very smart and the Governor should do everything possible before he goes to the voters. That includes eliminating 70% of the boards and commissions, all agency departments etc....

Sacramento offices of the Department of Justice are closed due to a broken water main that has affected water service to two buildings. The problem affects about 800 employees. Click here for a few more details on our sister blog, Capitol Alert.

Gov. Jerry Brown's order to eliminate half the state's 96,000 cell phones to save $20 million per year reminded Bee columnist Dan Walters of another Brown order 35 years ago.

Instead of cell phones, then-Gov. Brown whacked state-issued brief cases. Walters tells us that they were plastic, "cheesy" totes with the words "State of California" engraved on the side.

So much of what a governor does in the first days of an administration sends a message, whether naming key appointments, changing longstanding rules, allowing other policies to stand or axing perks like briefcases and cell phones. (Of course, you can debate whether they're perks or useful tools that pay for themselves many times over with increased off-site work productivity.)

We're considering writing about the Brown Crackdown for our Thursday State Worker column. We're interested in what state workers think. Is the cell phone cutback a sound policy? Will managers, supervisors and department heads follow through? Or has the announcement made a PR splash that won't be matched by a wave of cell phone returns throughout state government?

We're looking for folks willing to talk about the cell phone order on the record, pro or con. If that's you, shoot us an e-mail at jortiz@sacbee.com with a contact phone number. We're planning to file the column by 4:30 p.m. today.

Today's online Q&A (click here for the replay) included many questions about the future of furloughs under Gov. Jerry Brown. It's a huge issue: About a third of unionized state employees in six bargaining units are still taking a three-day-per-month furlough hit to their pay.

Many state employees hoped that Brown would immediately end the policy-- which his election campaign criticized -- once he became governor.

The budget that Brown offered on Monday, however, assumes the policy will continue. Here are two key paragraphs from the employee compensation and retirement summary, which you can download by clicking here. We've underlined the sentence that touches on furloughs:

The Bee's Jim Sanders is reporting that Gov. Jerry Brown has ordered half the state's 96,000 cell phones turned in by June 1. Click here for more about it on our sister blog, Capitol Alert.

We're still combing through the budget for items of interest to state workers, but some of the best observations are coming from folks like Blog User S, who notes that private prison expenditures fall by 45 percent next year under Brown's budget.

This year's California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation budget assumes $410 million paid to private firms for housing California inmates. Next year the expenditure would drop to $224 million.

Out-of-state private prison costs, the most expensive line item in the CDCR contracted facilities budget, would go from $272 million in the current year to $148 million in 2011-12.

Click here to see details of the CDCR budget.

PHOTO: www.freefoto.com

Two time-honored symbols of state excess, cell phones and vehicles, are targeted in the budget proposed by Gov. Jerry Brown this morning.

From page 7 of the introduction to the governor's 2011-12 budget (click here to open it):

Two areas of particular scrutiny will be the use of cell phones by state employees and the number of state vehicles. The state currently pays for about 96,000 cell phones, one for over 40 percent of all state employees. The Governor has set a statewide goal of reducing the number of cell phones by at least 50 percent. In addition, the Administration will reduce the number of vehicles the state maintains. There are approximately 13,600 light duty vehicles (cars, pickups, vans) in the state fleet, not including some 12,000 that are used for public safety. To reduce the number of vehicles in the state's fleet, the Administration will require each vehicle's purpose and necessity to be rejustified. Only vehicles necessary for critical state functions will be retained, and only when retaining such vehicles is cost effective.

The same introduction mentions cuts previously announced, including eliminating the Office of the Secretary of Education, cutting the Inspector General for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and trimming the governor's office budget by 25 percent.

Gov. Jerry Brown said this morning that he wants state employees in unions without contracts to accept $308 million in concessions as part of a wide-ranging downshift in state spending. He also wants to add a lower health insurance option for state workers and retirees.

The cuts would be bargained to cover 63,000 state workers represented by California Attorneys, Administrative Law Judges and Hearing Officers in State Employment; California Correctional Peace Officers Association; California Statewide Law Enforcement Association; Professional Engineers in California Government; California Association of Professional Scientists; and International Union of Operating Engineers.

"This will all be done through collective bargaining and I'm sure there will be resistance. But that's what collective bargaining is for," Brown said.

Brown's budget proposal adds a "core health care option" that saves $72 million by providing "fundamental coverage at a lower premium," according to the 2011-12 budget summary of employee compensation and retirement.

The state faces at least a $25 billion deficit over the next 18 months. Along with cuts to employee compensation, Brown is proposing slashing college budgets, welfare and other services. He also proposed shifting many of the policies and services that the state now handles, such as juvenile justice and short-term inmate incarceration, to local governments.

It's not clear what the long-term impact would be to the size of state government or the number of state workers. To ease the transition, the governor wants the Legislature to put up a ballot measure to extend taxes or another five years set to expire this year. If the measure fails, he said, the impact to the budget is fairly simple to estimate.

"Look through those different slides" he said pointing to a monitor that detailed $12.5 billion in cuts across the government spectrum, "and multiply by two."

Brown demurred when asked about budget specifics if voters reject the tax extension: "Some people would say I'm putting a gun to their head, so I'm not going to do that."

Talk about irony.

Work on a massive state computer hardware and software system to improve its financial reporting continues, but no one seems to know for sure how much the project will eventually cost or how to pay for it, according to a new state report.

The uncertain future of the Financial Information System for California project, or FI$Cal, and former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's hiring restrictions translated into high turnover among the project's key staff and hurt efforts to hire qualified replacements.

That further hampered work on the project, which aims to integrate the state government's vast and varied accounting, human resources and procurement systems into one. Currently, the state's financial data networks are a patchwork of dissimilar systems built piecemeal over many years.

State Auditor Elaine Howle's five-page update on the project notes:

CalPERS says it's partnering with the University of California San Francisco to study health complications that could be avoided with better care. CalPERS says in this announcement that so-called "potentially avoidable complications" account for nearly 25 percent of U.S. private sector health care costs.

The one-year pilot program starts this month with university researchers examining chronic conditions, surgeries and acute medical events involving CalPERS members in the PERSCare, PERS Choice and PERS Select health plans.

The goal is to figure out how to cut down on avoidable health complications, which will drive down costs and improve the well-being of those who need medical care.

Click here for a September CalPERS Health Benefits Committee agenda item that analyzes the pilot program's advantages and disadvantages. CalPERS staff supported the project.

The State Worker has fielded a dozen e-mails about a recent report that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has spent $1 million for a new security fence at its Sacramento headquarters.

The e-mails refer to either a YouTube video of the CDCR buildings and their recently installed security gates or a blog that both ask whether the real reason for the new fence is fear of retaliation from released inmates. The blog claims that the new barrier "appears to be about 20 feet high."

Several of the e-mailers accused The State Worker of a cover up.

"Why haven't you reported this? Why are you hiding the truth about CDCr (sic) wasting money on the fence?" one anonymous e-mailer asked.

Well, first of all, we didn't know about it. And second, because it's not true. CDCR doesn't own the property. The department didn't pay for the security upgrades that have been installed in the last few weeks. And the 8-foot-tall fences didn't cost $1 million. Not even close. Here's the story:

Editor's note, 12:35 p.m.: An earlier version of this post said that CalPERS is accepting loan applications until Friday. The fund has since decided to push back the date by one week.

We knew that CalPERS is getting out of the member home mortgage business. Now we can report that the deadline for applying for a loan and locking in the rate is Dec. 24.

That wasn't clear on Monday when the fund issued this press release. It referred to CalPERS deciding to end its member home loan program, but it didn't say exactly when the fund would stop accepting loan applications.

So we asked. CalPERS spokesman Wayne Davis said in an e-mail today that the fund will "honor registered loan applications with a locked-in rate through Dec. 24."

The Member Home Loan Program started 29 years ago and offers conventional loans at market rates.

CalPERS members have taken out more than 136,000 loans worth more than $22.7 billion over that time. Demand for the program has fallen off, however. Through the first nine months of this year 2,283 loans have been originated through the program, Davis said.

PHOTO: Sacramento Bee file

CalPERS Special Review: Selected Recommendations

As reported by Bee colleague Dale Kasler, CalPERS took some public shots this week from an independent counsel who investigated the fund for more than a year.

Dale wrote in this story that Washington, D.C. attorney Philip Kinda recommended "a broad array of reforms for the nation's largest public pension fund. Khinda's proposals range from a ban on gifts to board members to a restructuring of how CalPERS doles out the millions of dollars in fees it pays its investment partners."

We thought that State Worker blog users would like to read the Kinda report, so we've posted the nine-page document above. Pay particular attention to item No. 7, which implies that the fund had no choice but to leave Leon Shahinian on the payroll for four months after a lawsuit filed by Attorney General Jerry Brown alleged the senior investment officer had taken bribes.

We've received intra-agency e-mails and documents sent to State Compensation Insurance Fund employees about the fund's consolidation, a plan that we reported in this blog post earlier today.

Here are the docs and a press release that went out today:

• Click here for an employee Q&A concerning the plan.
• Here's a 2011-12 time line for the consolidation.
• This link opens the list of offices that will absorb operations (includes three "satellite locations").
• Clicking here opens the fund's press release.

The quasi-public State Compensation Insurance Fund is closing its downtown San Francisco home office, shuttering field offices and shuffling employees to consolidate operations, aiming to save an estimated $200 million over three years.

The plan will go into motion in September 2011. It's not yet clear what the plan means for Sacramento. Some insurance adjuster jobs here will move to offices in Redding or Stockton, fund spokeswoman Jennifer Vargen said this morning. But other jobs now outside of the capital region will move, since the fund is consolidating its underwriting services here.

Vargen said the fund hasn't yet analyzed the net impact on Sacramento.

Fund officials started visiting employees around the state on Wednesday to explain the plan, which will go in motion next fall. It likely means some of its 8,000 employees will leave rather than move, despite assurances from its leadership that anyone willing to switch locations can keep their job.

"The nearest office to where I work is a three-hour drive away -- in Bakersfield," said one employee in State Fund's Oxnard office who didn't want to be identified complaining about her employer. She hopes to find work in the private sector.

State Fund operates as a state alternative to private worker compensation insurance companies. Although it is a government-created agency, it operates solely on client premiums, and the returns it generates from investments and competes in the insurance provider market. Its employees are considered state workers.

The fund is going to leave its 16-story home office at 1275 Market St. in San Francisco. Most of the 800 or so employees who work there will have a chance to relocate to State Fund locations in Vacaville or Pleasanton. Vargen said that California law requires State Fund keep a presence in San Francisco, so executives along with some finance and legal staff will move to another location in the city.

Claims services will consolidate to Redding, Stockton, Pleasanton, Fresno, Riverside and Bakersfield. The fund will keep satellite offices in Eureka, Bakersfield and Monterrey Park.

Closing: Glendale, Oxnard, Burbank, City of Commerce, San Bernardino, San Diego and San Francisco.

CalPERS investment committee will examine its member home loan program again next week, with staff recommending the full board ax the program. Given the hassle of administering the program, the small number of members who use it and the growing number of failed loans, it's a bad deal for CalPERS, according to this November assessment.

The Bee's Dale Kasler reported that the board was set to vote on the program last month but backed off after President Rob Feckner said CalPERS' members should be better informed before any decision is made.

The fund held a meeting on Dec. 3 for "employee groups and key stakeholders," according to this report by Affiliate Investments Program Division Chief Geraldine Jimenez. That followed a mass e-mail sent on Nov. 19 to employers that laid out the situation and invited questions.

The investment committee will hear about the feedback from those outreach efforts next Monday. If the board follows the staff recommendation, the fund will stop accepting new loan applications right away but mortgages already in the pipeline would be completed.

PHOTO: CalPERS headquarters in Sacramento / Sacramento Bee file.

Space constraints limit our State Worker column on Thursdays to roughly 425 words, so much of what we learn in the ramp-up to writing never sees print. Column Extras give State Worker blog users more information -- the notes, the quotes, the data and the documents that inform the weekly feature.

Our column in today's Bee mentions a letter to staff from Inspector General David Shaw, blasting Tuesday's report from the Senate Office of Oversight and Outcomes that questions whether OIG needs lawyers and auditors with peace officer status.

Here's the Shaw e-mail:

The Bureau of State Audits has released a report that says the state doesn't fully comply with the Dymally-Alatorre Bilingual Services Act. The 1973 law mandates that government agencies serving a "substantial" number of non-English-speaking people must employ enough bilingual workers to "ensure provision of information and services to the public in the language of the non-English-speaking person."

The State Personnel Board needs to do more to enforce the law at the state level, auditors said, and the departments/agencies reviewed needed to do a better job of surveying their foreign language needs and follow through, such as providing translations of written materials.

Auditors in 1999 had many of the same criticisms, the report says.

Local governments surveyed by the BSA fell down on the job, too. Of the 10 locals reviewed, nine conducted required language surveys, but four reported "erroneous results and two could not adequately support their results."

Click here for the summary of the report, scroll or word search the full document below using Scribd's tools, or click the link to download the PDF. Responses from the Personnel Board, Highway Patrol, DMV, Justice and other audited state departments start on page 71.

Dymally-Alatorre Bilingual Services Act Audit

If you're one of several thousand CalPERS members who asked about the cost for adding service credit and it seems like it's took a long time for the fund to give you an answer, well, it wasn't your imagination.

Inquiries to CalPERS about service credit time have spiked so high that staff has fallen behind processing them for the last nine months, according to a report that the fund's board will hear on Tuesday.

The run up in requests was triggered in part by CalPERS' decision in September to immediately increase the cost of Additional Retirement Service Credit Purchases, or "airtime," by up to an average of 23 percent for state workers. (We broke the news about the policy change in this Sept. 9 post. The board hiked airtime prices the following week.)

Staff furloughs at the fund didn't help lighten the workload, either.

Here's what Donna Ramel Lum of CalPERS' Member and Benefit Services Branch says in a report scheduled for Tuesday's Benefits and Program Administration Committee meeting:

Blog backs review your thoughtful and provocative online comments, amplify points, answer questions, correct our mistakes and humbly accept your warranted criticism.

Nov. 5 Corrections contracts out-of-state facilities for 2,600 inmates

Here's a brief comment/conversation that starts with a suggestion/criticism and ends with ... well, you'll see:

And just what does this cost me as a tax payer? How about some numbers Ortiz? What's (sic) the costs to outsource to another State (Cost Per Bed) in regards to the actual costs to house inmates in a California State Prison? I know the overcrowding is an issue however, is this the most cost effective way to resolve the overcrowding? Let's do some reporting and state the facts and numbers......

We should have included the costs in the post.

For the record, the GEO Group agreement is to house 2,600 prisoners at $60 million per year. That rounds out to about $23,000 annually per inmate. The four-year contract starts in 2011.

Talks with Corrections Corp. of America aim to ship nearly 2,400 more California inmates out of state, besides the nearly 10,000 it currently houses. The two-year contract will cost $300 million annually, or about $24,000 per inmate.

California's per-inmate housing cost in 2008-09 was roughly $47,000, according to this Legislative Analyst's Office report.That was among the highest in the nation.

If you really want to dig into the topic, check out this report by the Pew Public Safety Performance Project. It's a tad dated, but interesting nonetheless.

Moving on ... Apparently, some users are still bothered over our recent series of posts on unions' political spending.

"From the notebook" posts give State Worker blog users some of the details and documents behind the news.

Our story in today's Bee looks at the deal worked out to allow federally appointed prison medical receiver J. Clark Kelso to keep his state employee status while working at the pleasure of U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson.

The story explains how Kelso is a consultant to the Administrative Office of the Courts for payroll purposes. The arrangement allows him to maintain independence from the executive and legislative branches of government -- key to his role as the federal appointee tasked with reforming the state's prison medical system -- while continuing his membership in CalPERS as a state employee.

Click here to read several documents that informed this story, including the receiver's employment agreement between the Administrative Office of the Courts and the nonprofit California Prison Health Care Receivership Corp., Henderson's order appointing Kelso as the receiver, Kelso's biography and two letters from Henderson to the AOC about the deal.

One of Kelso's former employees, Linda Buzzini, asked CalPERS to count her employment as a receivership staff attorney toward her CalPERS pension. The fund denied her request. This link downloads CalPERS' 10-page response, which was copied to Kelso and CalPERS CEO Anne Stausboll.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has contracted the with Boca Raton, Fla.-based The GEO Group Inc. to ship 2,600 inmates to facilities outside of California, according to this department blog post.

The department also plans to extend a similar agreement with Corrections Corporation of America, which is headquartered in Nashville.

About 10,000 California inmates are housed outside the state.

Hat tip to blog user B for flagging this for The State Worker.

PHOTO: Courtesy California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation / cdcrtoday.blogspot.com

The state will soon issue layoff warnings to about 1,000 state custodians with the goal of eliminating about 450 jobs by the end of February, The State Worker has learned.

The layoffs have been prompted by the pending sale of 11 state buildings to California First LLC, a partnership that includes Texas-based Hines Interests and Antarctica Capital of New York.

Department of General Services spokesman Eric Lamoureux confirmed the plan to issue surplus notices by Nov. 1. The department will begin meeting with affected employees next week.

The new owner has "given indication they want to hire as many of our employees as possible," Lamoureux said. DGS will also help workers move to other government jobs. The affected employees are in Bargaining Unit 15 and are represented by SEIU Local 1000.

State layoff rules allow displaced employees who are more senior to "bump" those with less service time. So even though the state is eliminating the 450 positions and another 50 vacancies, it will issue double that many layoff notices to include workers who might be bumped.

The $2.3 billion sale hasn't closed yet, he said, but it probably will within the next few months, perhaps before the end of the four-month layoff notice period. Regardless, "no one will lose their job before the end of the 120-day notice period," Lamoureaux said.

The Bee learned of the layoff plan today, just eight days after Local 1000 and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger agreed to a new three-year labor contract. The deal, which doesn't provide layoff protections, has been approved by the Legislature. Union members begin voting on Monday with a deadline of Nov. 8 to cast ballots.

Chief economic adviser to Gov. Arnold Gov. Schwarzenegger's, David Crane, reads The State Worker. How do we know? Because he responded to a question posed at the end of our Monday post, "Schwarzenegger's job chart."

In a video posted here, the governor credits Crane with pulling together a chart that indicates private sector employment in California has plunged while public sector employment has remained essentially flat.

That chart was the subject of our Monday post, which concluded with a question: Is job loss the only legitimate way to measure 'pain'?

Here's Crane's answer, sent via e-mail through administration spokeswoman Rachel Arrezola:

As we reported in Thursday's State Worker column, the Schwarzenegger administration's cost for furlough litigation has crossed the $1 million threshold. Now we have the latest contract with the private firm handling the state's side of the litigation, Sacramento-based Kronick, Moskovitz, Tiedemann & Girard.

The latest terms allow up to $1.75 million for services rendered by Kronick from Nov. 1, 2008, through June 30, 2011.

Click here to read the current contract between the state and the law firm plus all of the other agreements drawn up since late 2008.