By Louis Wong, President, San Francisco Police Officers Association
The California Legislature has sent an unmistakable message about Assembly Bill 1383.
The State Senate approved the measure 33-0. The Assembly approved it 70-2. Republicans and Democrats, representing communities large and small throughout California, overwhelmingly agreed that the state needs to address the growing difficulty of recruiting and retaining police officers, firefighters and other first responders.
The San Francisco Police Officers Association supports AB 1383 because California has a public-safety workforce problem, and pretending otherwise will not make it disappear.
Police departments throughout California are competing for a limited number of qualified officers. Vacancies remain open, experienced officers move to other jurisdictions, mandatory overtime increases and departments spend substantial amounts of money recruiting and training replacements.
The Peace Officers Research Association of California has identified the disparity between employees hired before and after the state’s 2013 pension reforms as one of the factors contributing to that problem. Today, two police officers can work side by side, face the same dangers and perform essentially the same job but receive dramatically different retirement benefits simply because they were hired on different dates. PORAC argues that this disparity hurts morale and contributes to recruitment and retention problems.
AB 1383 is a targeted attempt to address that problem.
It would lower the maximum retirement-benefit age for PEPRA public-safety employees from 57 to 55. It also would create the possibility of a 3%-at-55 retirement formula. Importantly, that enhanced formula is not automatic. It becomes available only when the public employer and its employees mutually agree to it through collective bargaining.
That point has sometimes been lost in the debate.
AB 1383 does not dictate the same pension agreement to San Francisco, Los Angeles, Fresno, Sacramento and every other California community. It gives local governments and their public-safety employees another tool they can negotiate according to their own staffing requirements and financial circumstances.
Nor does AB 1383 wipe away the pension reforms enacted more than a decade ago. PORAC describes it as a calibrated adjustment to a system created in the aftermath of the Great Recession. The reforms enacted at that time addressed genuine fiscal concerns, but PORAC argues that experience since then has exposed an unintended consequence: a substantial benefit gap between generations of officers that can make already-difficult recruiting and retention problems worse.
There is also a practical reality about police work that cannot be ignored. Patrol officers do not spend their careers sitting behind desks. They respond to violent crimes, crashes, people in crisis and unpredictable emergencies. The physical and psychological demands accumulate over decades. The Legislature heard similar arguments from firefighters and other first responders before overwhelmingly approving the bill.
Critics understandably focus on pension costs. Public agencies have an obligation to taxpayers, and those costs deserve scrutiny.
But there is another side of that ledger.
An understaffed police department also costs money. So does mandatory overtime. So does repeatedly recruiting, hiring and training officers who later leave for competing agencies. So do vacancies, injuries and disability retirements.
PORAC estimates that AB 1383’s two mandatory provisions — the retirement-age adjustment and compensation-cap alignment — would increase annual employer normal-cost contributions statewide by approximately $151.5 million. PORAC compares that figure with CalPERS’ projected $26.5 billion in employer PEPRA savings from 2023 through 2033.
PORAC argues that the cost of AB 1383 therefore should not be considered in isolation. The costs created by sustained vacancies, mandatory overtime, continual recruitment and lateral losses also compound year after year.
California lawmakers appear to have found that argument persuasive.
A 33-0 Senate vote and a 70-2 Assembly vote are remarkable in an era when Sacramento disagrees about almost everything. AB 1383 brought Republicans and Democrats together around the proposition that recruiting and retaining the men and women who protect California communities deserves attention.
For the members of the San Francisco Police Officers Association, this isn’t an abstract pension debate. It is about whether San Francisco and other California communities will be able to attract talented people to policing, retain experienced officers and put enough officers on the street to answer the public’s calls for help.
AB 1383 represents the approach its supporters believe can help accomplish that goal while leaving significant decisions about enhanced benefits where they belong: at the local bargaining table. We urge Gov. Newsom to sign the bill.
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