The Gilded Palace of Sin

I have to confess that the title of this Flying Burrito Brothers album jumped into my head after seeing a color news photo of the Capitol Building in Salem with its gilded statue on top.  It also reminded me of the line from an old Gilbert and Sullivan operetta “nothing is ever as it seems”, or its modern incarnation as “objects in mirror are closer than they appear.”  So what is this all about?  I am not a believer in conspiracy theories, blind and willful ignorance, or plain incompetence (I do occasionally make exceptions).  I’m also not one to panic, for myself, or for others.  But, I have to confess that actions in the past week have given me new respect for the power of mean-spirited people, being pursued by an angry and worried crowd, to come up with magician’s tricks to fool people into thinking they’ve won a small (or large) victory, when they have, in fact, won nothing.

Since you all know that I write only about PERS (and recently only about the Legislature and its long history of trying to take benefits away from workers), I have been following the discussion (and contributing to it) regarding the Senate Workforce Committee and its unwillingness to confront PERS in more than a desultory way (I mean that; I take nothing from all the informational meetings except a complete unwillingness to do anything for or against PERS bills except to pick two bills and send them up, with all their attached amendment and without any recommendation, so that the Black Hole known as the Joint Ways and Means Committee can do their bidding in the absence of light).  I think this is a cowardly and unprincipled position, and I suspect there are some deeply hidden agendas being played out by leaders of both parties, the Unions, and a variety of other organizations who want money and don’t really care all that much how they get it.

That’s the background, but what’s new?  In the final analysis, after all the stürm und drang over PERS, two bills seem to have survived and will be forwarded without recommendation (the cowardly act) to the Joint Ways and Means Committee, where the action is done is less-than-public view.  The two bills, well-discussed in previous posts are SB 559 (unamended) and SB 560 (unamended, plus 10 [or possibly only 9, see below] amendments) that will be forwarded without any further discussion.

Last Wednesday, the Workforce Committee held its only public hearing where the public was actually permitted to testify on these two bills.  The primary objection was to the presence of an Emergency Clause in both bills, but especially in Senate Bill 560.  Unfortunately, the magician’s trick worked.  Eyes were distracted from the true problem, and like magicians working an audience, the members of the Workforce Committee promised to amend the bill (SB 560) to remove the Emergency Clause.  And they did in a single amendment numbered dash-15.  But like all magicians, the amendment removed the Emergency Clause from the original bill, as introduced, without touching the Emergency Clause in any of the 9 amendments in which it is replicated.  Worse still, either through willful deception, magician’s tricks, or distraction, the Committee did not grasp (again naivete is not an excuse for this experienced group of legislators), that the REAL problem was not the Emergency Clause (in fact, the Emergency Clause is actually necessary for reasons illuminated in multiple previous posts), but the lack of a date certain in the dash-3 amendment, and the section on the bottom of pages 24-25 of the Dash-10 amendment pertaining to the decoupling of the Money Match annuity rate from the system’s actuarially assumed interest rate.  In both amendments, this particular change is fomenting all the fear, uncertainty, and doubt, not to mention causing untold anxiety for near-term Money Match pre-retirees and leading to a mass exodus of people since the beginning of the year.  In both sections of these amendments, these changes, but NO OTHERS, are targeted to “…take effect on passage”.  All other provisions take effect on January 1, 2018.  With the emergency clause in, the “takes effect on passage” means that the section in question would become law the moment the bill is signed into law (i.e. anywhere from late May to Early July).  Removing the Emergency Clause changes nothing about those sections because the courts would have to decide exactly when the bill took effect.  

The problem could be solved simply by omitting the passage “…takes effect on passage” and inserting “…takes effect with retirements on or after January 1, 2018”.  So far, the situation is made even more complicated because the Chief Legislative Counsel, Dexter Johnson, issued a memo to the Senate Workforce Committee pointing out why taking the emergency clause out is a bad idea.  The reasons are virtually identical to those articulated here in multiple previous posts, in responses to individual emails, and in posts over on PERS Oregon Discussion (see link to left).  Without the Emergency Clause, PERS is prohibited from recalculating employer rates until on or after January 1, 2018, and litigants are unable to begin the legal process of contesting any element of this bill before January 1, 2018.  There are other reasons as well, but the long and the short of this is that the Emergency Clause is necessary so that the legal status of any of these changes can be largely settled by about this same time in 2019, while the Legislature is undoubtedly dealing with other budget issues.  So, after everything that happened last Wednesday, it is likely that the dash-15 amendment will die, the Emergency Clause will remain, and PERS members trying to sort through their options will be left in the same position they were in last Wednesday before the promise “…not to create a crisis or chaos”.  No one can convince me that members of the Senate Workforce Committee were so ignorant, so naive, and so patronizing that they didn’t know exactly what they were doing.  I’m sure they deliberately agreed to removing the Emergency Clause, knowing full-well that it would be put back for the reasons enunciated here, there, and everywhere.

I don’t think I have ever seen a more concerted campaign to distract attention away from the real problem with any bill as I’ve seen in the Senate Workforce Committee.  In the past, legislators were downright nasty to one another over bills as harmful as these; this year, I’m nearly in a diabetic coma from the sweetness of members on this committee who have polar opposite viewpoints on issues pertaining to budgets, PERS, and workforce.  This all suggests to me that Dems, Repubs, Unions, Employers, Oregon Business Council, organizations like OPRI, the PERS Coalition are all involved in many backroom, off-the-grid discussions of how to balance the budget, partly on the backs of PERS members both near and far from retirement.  And this all leads me to brand the Legislature of 2017, meeting under that gilded dome, the Gilded Palace of Sin.

Believe nothing you hear from a Legislator or a Union at this point in time.  Only when you see something in writing, in the form of a bill, an amendment to a bill, or a complete revision of a bill should you take words seriously.  Written words matter; talk is cheap.  So far, nothing said and certainly nothing written offers any assurance that what is proposed to happen will happen in any other way.  Let those words guide your actions.  Make no assumptions, accept no assurances.  It is time for all these people who have been offering vague assurances to put their words on legal paper rather than in in tweets, emails, or E-lerts.  Only when those words make it to bills that matter do any of those stupid assurances have any meaning.  Beware of Emergency Clauses, but beware even more of clauses that have no certain date in them, or bills being forwarded into a Black Hole with blanks where numbers should be.  If you take those assurances at face value, then you are a sucker, and you are playing right into the hands of the charlatans of the Gilded Palace of Sin.

Note added later:  As predicted, the Senate Workforce Committee punted both SB 559 and SB 560 to the Joint Ways and Means Committee.  The votes were both 3-2 in favor of referring without a recommendation.  Senators Gelser and Monnes-Anderson opposed sending either measure forward.  But, in a seriously bizarre twist, perhaps influenced by this blog, perhaps by the sheer number of panicked members, there were three new amendments sent up along with the original SB 560 and the already extant 10 amendments (including the one to eliminate the Emergency Clause).  Of the three new amendments, only Dash-11 and Dash-12 merit note.  While these amendments seem to be variations on the same theme, there are three elements of note in each:  (1) the elimination of the decoupling of the Money Match annuity rate from the system’s actuarially assumed interest rate (the whole section has just vanished); (2) the inclusion of a clear implementation date for all remaining provisions of the bill at 1/1/2018; and, as predicted (3) the restoration of the Emergency Clause.  It would be nice to claim victory or to offer assurances, but this isn’t the way life works.  The effect of this is simply to add more permutations and more combinations of ways in which Joint Ways and Means can choose to implement changes to PERS going forward.  As I noted elsewhere, it appears that we are nearly back a ground zero, with a new group of people to consider changes to PERS not necessarily based on policy considerations, but solely on the basis of how well the changes help balance the 2017-19 budget.  Since the Senate Workforce Committee made no choices, made no recommendations, Joint Ways and Means now has a Chinese menu of options from which they can select one from Column A, one from Column B, and give current and inactive workers an egg roll and a misfortune cookie.  Sadly, this offers those in the position of trying to time retirements to avoid the impact of these changes no guidance whatsoever.  Not only has nothing been clarified, now people are faced with nearly the same list of options proposed long ago by the Portland City Club (except the COLA change is now off the table).  The list of amendments reads like a recitation of that list of changes, coupled with the spaghetti theory of jurisprudence attached - we magicians of the Gilded Palace of Sin do hereby resolve to throw anything we perceive as legal up against the Supreme Court’s wall, and we will take whatever sticks.  It probably isn’t that bad, but it sure feels that way.  [This will be my last post before the end of April; nothing is happening and I’m leaving town.  I’ll be back before anything worth commenting on takes place].