A Disconbuberated Boob at the Rood Center

George Rebane

This is a hard post to write.  I have been agonizing since leaving the Board of Supervisors meeting at the Rood Center a little after mid-day.  This was the day when Nevada County’s CFO Joe Christoffel gave his scheduled quarterly report on the county’s fiscal health to a full chamber.   Everyone had come to find out about the county’s significant unfunded pension liabilities.  As announced in these pages (here), Michael McDaniel of SESF gave a short and workmanlike presentation on the pension liabilities which was then followed by Mr. Christoffel’s main event wherein he would cover the county’s position on these liabilities.  This was followed by some Q&A, and we all walked out for the noon recess.  By then my head was spinning.

 

To frame these remarks, let me begin by saying that our county’s leadership and staff are about the best that any citizen, at least of my political leanings and ideology, could expect to have working for them.  Oh, I could pick nits with some of the supes, but as a group they are head and shoulders above damn near any set of politicos you could vote into office these days.  And our staff under CEO Rick Haffey is a first class team.  So what set my head spinning as I scribbled many pages of notes?

After Mr. McDaniel – representing the Nevada County Tea Party Patriots arrayed behind him in red T-shirts – finished telling us that the county’s ‘miscellaneous’ staff pension funding was $83 million unfunded, he gave some recommendations to soften the future.  Some of these recommendations have been spelled out here.  But McDaniel’s two biggies were a two-tiered system where new county hires would be offered markedly lower benefit packages than existing employees, and a new taxpayer committee formed to advise the Board on matters of employee compensation.

Well, the committee of taxpayers went over like the proverbial flatulence in church.  All supes responded by telling McDaniel that in fact each of them was charged with representing their respective districts’ taxpayers, thank you very much.  These remarks were delivered in tones polite, civil, and under tight control - although I did see a bit of steam escape from Supervisor Beason’s left ear, but only momentarily.

McDaniel’s taxpayer committee idea was labeled as “another layer of government” and deep-sixed then and there.  But to be fair, then all the county leadership, led a bit uncomfortably by CEO Haffey, took turns thanking the Tea Party folks and Mr. McDaniel for coming to express their concerns about unfunded liabilities and how these liabilities were to be handled.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Joe Christoffel followed McDaniel and gave a tour de force performance with well prepared notes and a 43 slide PowerPoint.  The man is a professional on all fronts, and presented nothing that seemed to either surprise, embarrass, or inform the Board – they had been thoroughly briefed on all of this before.  However, we in the audience were in awe and wonderment as the cascade of numbers and percentages and graphs washed over us.

It is hard to summarize all that data and information, and I shouldn’t really try since reporting on the county’s fiscal details is really not my purpose here.  But let me throw out a few salient facts anyway –

• County’s 09/10 General Fund budget: $64,000,000
• 09/10 projected General Fund revenues: $63,492,899
• County’s discretionary General Fund fraction: about 70%
• Salaries & benefits fraction of budget: 62.65%
• 2009 reserve (rainy day) fund: $19,644,000
• Projected 2010 reserve: $18,289,000
• Number of county employees: 906
• Projected miscellaneous employee unfunded pension liabilities: $???
• Unacknowledged and uncontested current unfunded pension liabilities:  $83,000,000
(Many thanks to Joe Christoffel and Michael McDaniel for sending me a copies of their presentations.)

 

During his presentation Mr. Christoffel inserted numerous well-placed remarks that recognized the extraordinary wisdom of the Board and their demonstrated record of making the timely, difficult, yet correct decisions to keep the county on the straight and narrow.  All this while other counties were spending their bubble revenues like there would be no tomorrow.  Included in these accolades was the industrious and professional county staff without whose diligent execution of policy none of this remarkable performance could have been achieved.

At the conclusion and in their turn, the supes, individually and in harmony, lavished reciprocal sentiments on Messrs Haffey and Christoffel, and divers others on the county’s payroll.  Sitting at the public mikes, even Messrs McDaniel and Stan Meckler (of the Tea Party Patriots) were swept into the mutual admiration chorus.  Several times in this interval, these congratulatories were rendered with such sincerity and depth of feeling that many of us in the audience were sorry we didn’t pack a hanky.  The entire affair was carried live on Nevada County’s community TV and local radio.

Then it was over and everyone went to lunch.  I scrambled through my notes to see if there was any mention of how the county was going to handle the unfunded liabilities.  Somehow and some time the $83 million sword of Damocles over our heads was going to be reduced again, to what, the $48 million Swiss army knife we had in 2006?  Did I miss the magic – was Calpers’ 8.75% projected annual investment return going to do it, was Helicopter Ben going drop a few mil on Nevada County as he trundles bundles of stimu-billions to Sacramento, or …?

I really don’t know what happened.  But just as if pixie dust had been sprinkled in our eyes, by lunch time the entire unfunded liabilities problem had literally disappeared, and we all left the Rood Center in a mood of bonhomie seldom seen in these parts.  As an amateur in these matters, I am still a little dazed to have witnessed how seemingly insurmountable financial conundrums at the local level can be made to disappear, and with good feelings all around.  I bet if we could can it, we could sell it. 

There is much more to report, but now it’s late, and maybe tomorrow things will become a little more clear.