A few snippets of state worker news worth watching:

• Three ballot measures drawing fire from public labor unions can begin collecting signatures, aiming to make a 2012 ballot.

The initiatives would end public employee collective bargaining, tax six-figure CalPERS and CalSTRS pensions up to 25 percent and raise the minimum retirement age for members of those retirement systems to 65 (or 58 for sworn public safety officers).

Labor teed off after the secretary of state's Wednesday announcement the measures could circulate.

"These extremist attempts at undermining retirement security for millions of Californians are dead on arrival," said Steve Maviglio of Californians for Retirement, which represents 1.5 million public employees.

The initiatives' author, UC Santa Barbara economics lecturer Lanny Ebenstein, must collect 807,615 valid voter signatures for each measure to get them on a 2012 ballot.

Ebenstein couldn't be reached Wednesday, but last month he told The State Worker that unnamed backers had committed a few hundred thousand dollars to a signature drive and that in all he'll need $1.5 million with a lot of volunteer help.

Then there's the millions more in campaign cash he'll need for the union ad war.

• State government's flexibility – and when's the last time you saw those three words together? – gets a test that starts Friday.

Unless lawmakers mount some opposition, efforts launch tomorrow to reorganize two state personnel departments into a single human resources unit.

Brown wants to fuse the State Personnel Board and the Department of Personnel Administration to trim a decades-in-the-making bureaucratic thicket that bogs down things like employee hiring and discipline.

The system is so confusing that the state has a Web page titled, "Who does what – State Personnel Board and DPA." Print it out and you'll get a nine-page list with about 300 entries.

Today is the deadline for a Senate or Assembly resolution to block Brown's plan. Despite some union concerns, no one is against the concept. Look for the new California Department of Human Resources to launch July 1, 2012.

• Brown vetoed a bill that would have increased Cal-PERS payments to surviving spouses and dependents of local government workers.

The measure focused on 13,000 beneficiaries locked into plans that pay the least and have never been adjusted. A 79-year-old widow currently receiving a $180 monthly check since 1994, for example, would have seen the payment increase to $350.

CalPERS sponsored the bill, saying that it has more than enough money in the survivors' fund to cover the increases.

Politics, not payments, prompted Brown's thumbs down. His veto message hints at a larger agenda: "(T)he changes this bill makes should be part of a more comprehensive pension reform."

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Call The Bee's Jon Ortiz, (916) 321-1043. Read his blog, The State Worker, at sacbee.com/blogs.

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