Sacramento County Executive Brad Hudson assumed his new job with ambitions of attacting economic development and shoring up the county's shaky financial house. We hope he achieves those goals, but it won't be easy, given his emerging status as a poster child for what is wrong with the pension system for governmental managers and public employees in California.
Hudson earns more than a quarter-million dollars a year as Sacramento's CEO, $258,000 plus benefits, to be precise. At the same time, he collects a sizable public pension.
Hudson sits near the top end of the "$100,000 pension club," that growing segment of state and local government retirees who earn more than $100,000 in pensions annually. Hudson takes in nearly twice that, $16,451.50 a month or $197,000 a year.
Hudson is what is referred to in government retirement circles as a double-dipper.
After 25 years working for cities and counties in Southern California, he was able to retire at age 53 and collect a pension from the California Public Employee Retirement System. If he had gone to work for another CalPERS agency – the city of Sacramento, for example – he would not have been allowed to work more than 960 hours in a single year, or about six months. And he could not have earned more retirement credit.
By taking a job with Sacramento County, which has its own retirement system not affiliated with CalPERS, Hudson is able to earn a second public pension.
One of Gov. Jerry Brown's pension reform proposals would eliminate just the kind of double-dipping Hudson enjoys. It's one of the few reforms that even many public employee unions support.
Brown also wants to raise retirement ages. It may make sense for workers with physically demanding jobs, police and firefighters, for example, to retire in their early 50s. But why a city manager, which is the job Hudson retired from?
Most days, Brad Hudson sits in an office – an expensively appointed office, as has been reported recently by The Bee's Brad Branan. To collect nearly $200,000 in public employee retirement pay while picking up another quarter-million in public salary is excessive. If left unaddressed, it will surely fuel public outrage and lead to pension reform proposals that are far more onerous to public employees than those now on the table.
When Hudson adds a $7,300 desk and a $78 shoe polisher – really, who charges a struggling county government for a shoe polisher? – to a generous pension and high pay, it looks bad.
Appearances aside, such cavalier excess could well make it more difficult for Hudson to persuade the county's rank-and-file employees to make the kind of benefit and salary concessions the county will need to seek in coming years, especially if the economy remains in the tank. With a double pension and very shiny shoes, it could be hard for him to call upon county employees to take part in the shared sacrifice.
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