Louisiana Voice

For sheer audacity, it’s hard to top the performance of State Sen. Elbert Guillory (D-Opelousas) last week.

Guillory, the poster boy for ALEC and Piyush Jindal lapdogs, was the lead author of the gaggle of state retirement bills, including Senate Bill 740 which assures state retirees they will not be getting a cost of living adjustment for 10-15 years.

Despite Guillory’s efforts to put the best spin on the retirements which wound up being a general hodgepodge, he was trumped by Jindal Deputy Chief of Staff Kristy Nichols who insisted the administration “got what we wanted.” It was a classic example of mutual one-upsmanship in an effort by both to save face.

The only part of the retirement package to be approved in its original form was a provision to base retirement incomes on employees’ best five years income instead of three years as is presently done.

Jindal’s effort—through Guillory—to force state civil service employees to work to age 67 before qualifying for retirement—was amended drastically. Only employees with zero to five years experience would be required to work to 67 while those with six to ten years will be required to work to age 62. All others will remain the same.

Guillory in a particularly self-serving email to Capitol News Service, said, “Now that you have had an opportunity to review the Senate Retirement Committee’s work, I’m sure you appreciate the hard work and responsible outcomes produced by those seven men. No “fix,” no “buyout” by ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council). No underhanded tactics. Just hard work addressing a serious fiscal problem in careful responsible manner.”

Perhaps. But it would have been nice if the legislator had been working that hard the past 25 years to live up to its self-imposed requirement to pay down the unfunded accrued liability (UAL) of the state’s four retirement systems. Because of typically bad political policy, the legislature, in its infinite stupidity, decided to use those funds for other things, in the process allowing the UAL to grow unabated.

Now, though, state employees are being called on to make good on the legislature’s promise a quarter-century later. What’s more, the onus of the entire amount has been placed on the Louisiana State Employees’ Retirement System (LASERS) and higher education members of TRSL even though the LASERS share of the UAL is only about $6.3 billion. The balance of the UAL belongs to the Teachers Retirement System of Louisiana (TRSL), the Louisiana School Employees Retirement System (LSERS) and the Louisiana State Police Retirement System (LSPRS).

Guillory was asked why the pension reform changes are only being applied to LASERS and higher education employees in TRSL, he said state police and hazardous duty workers, who are exempted (fo far), “put their lives on the line. They face bullets every day. They have special disability issues. They have special survivorship issues, so they are in a special category. Their situation is more special. The same is true with K through 12 teachers. I’m not sure I want to see a teacher at age 67 still trying to handle the young students of today. There are just some special circumstances for teachers.

Two things are somewhat revealing in those comments. First of all, what he said about “young students of today” would seem to refute Jindal’s blanket condemnation of teachers while ignoring discipline problems and uninvolved parents as the root of most of public education’s current problems.

Second, as a reader recently wrote, if we are to believe Sen. Guillory, rank and file employees are not “special” or any particular value or importance. “We are also to believe that rank and file jobs do not involve any hazardous duties.

“Try telling that to employees of state psychiatric hospitals who are injured in the line of duty on a regular basis. Or tell that to Department of Transportation and Development (DOTD) employees who are struck by vehicles while repairing our highways. Or worse yet, try telling that to the families of the two Department of Insurance employees who were murdered recently while doing nothing more than gather routine regulatory information from an insurance broker.

“The simple lesson here is that Gov. Jindal has employed a very old and frequently successful ploy of divide and conquer with his so-called pension reform,” the reader said.

But Guillory’s most unabashed display of arrogance came during Senate debate over House Bill 61, which would create a new “cash balance” retirement plan for new hires, beginning July 1, 2013. Guillory said the plan would reduce state costs while containing the growth in long-term liabilities of the pension systems involved.

Sen. Sherri Smith Buffington (R-Keithville) said she was concerned over the provision for retirees to take a lump-sum pension benefit. She asked what would happen if a retiree spends the pension income to which Guillory incredulously replied, “We cannot protect people from making bad decisions in their lives.”

Guillory went on to say that a retiree might then have to apply for food stamps, welfare and other government programs.

Right. That’s going to save the state a boatload of money, right Senator?

That prompted one person to refer to Guillory’s plan as the “Cat Food Retirement Plan.”

National pension law expert Robert Klausner, representing LASERS and TRSL attempted to warn legislators against the bill’s passage, saying the proposed bill breaks employee contracts. “There’s no reason to pass an unconstitutional law,” he said. “All it does is create a field day for lawyers.”

Several weeks ago, with the Legislative Auditor hired a Dallas law firm to analyze the proposed retirement bills, the law firm came up with much the same response as Klausner.

To counter the auditor’s expert, the Division of Administration hired Buck Consultants of Boston at a cost of $400,000.

A LouisianaVoice public records request for a copy of the Buck report resulted in the release of a six-page document—about $66,667 per page. That report had just a three-paragraph narrative at the end. The rest consisted only of actuarial notes which projected a reduction of annual state contributions (the portion the state contributes to employee retirement funds) to LASERS and TRSL if enacted.

Jindal’s proposal—through Guillory’s bills—to move from a defined benefit to a defined contribution pension plan was a virtual clone of the “Defined-Contribution Retirement Act” model bill as drafted by ALEC at its New Orleans national convention last August, Guillory’s claims in his email to LouisianaVoice notwithstanding.

But that was just one of the bills proposed by ALEC.

A copy of ALEC’s complete proposed retirement reform legislation was obtained by Common Cause of Washington, D.C., which filed Freedom of Information Act requests for ALEC records.

The ALEC proposals and those of Guillory in the Senate and Rep. Kevin Pearson (R-Slidell) in the House are nearly identical in most aspects.

So, all things considered, it’s a little difficult to buy into Guillory’s braggadocio about his committee’s “hard work, no buyout by ALEC.” Nor do we agree that a “serious fiscal problem” was addressed in a “careful, responsible manner.”

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