Pension plan revisionism at the Chronicle

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Today, the Chronicle runs a seemingly sensible editorial that lauds “good guy” Mayor White’s plans to abolish the generous “Group C” time accrual provisions in the city’s pension plan:

Few City Hall insiders paid attention in 1999 when the head of the municipal employee pension board and former Mayor Lee Brown’s chief administrative officer, Al Haines, went to Austin to lobby legislators to change pension rules. The subsequent bill created an exclusive Group C category allowing the pension fund executive director and high-ranking city bureaucrats and department heads to receive double credit for every year served. The credits would be applied toward a maximum pension of 90 percent of their salary after 20 years.

As the Chronicle’s Dan Feldstein later reported, that obscure law resulted in a lucrative gain for Haines; his successor, former City Attorney Anthony Hall; and other city administrators. When Haines left the city in the waning months of Brown’s tenure in 2003, his pension had jumped from $36,000 a year to $103,000. It’s a case of a bureaucrat negotiating a deal that just happened to provide himself some well-funded golden years.

It’s a shame the Chronicle has just now decided to cover the shenanigans that took place in the Brown Administration.

It would have been nice if the newspaper had shown such interest five years ago. Contrary to the Chronicle‘s revisionism, the pension plan revisions were hardly “obscure.” What was obscure was the Chronicle‘s coverage. It was virtually nonexistent.

That’s why it’s hard to take what follows seriously:

It’s unfortunate that council members didn’t raise more questions when Haines and others were busy pushing the perk. Mayor White’s call for greater transparency in pension fund transactions aims at curing the root cause of this ill-conceived and self-serving boondoggle.

What is most unfortunate is that the city’s monopoly newspaper did not raise questions on its editorial pages about Mayor Brown’s questionable leadership when he was in office, or provide readers of its news pages enough information to reach informed conclusions about the pension plan (or numerous other issues). Instead, the newspaper was a big booster for Mayor Brown, endorsing him repeatedly and generally giving him a pass on its news pages, which frequently celebrated his “world class” plans for the city.

As I’ve written elsewhere, the pension plan problems that Mayor White “discovered” earlier this year might not have been a discovery if the city’s only newspaper hadn’t been busy with other matters (such as rail and Lee Brown boosterism).

Leaving aside the Chron‘s effort at revisionism, the editorial is spot on in urging the city to end the Group C benefit. The sooner the better.


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Kevin Whited is co-founder and publisher of blogHOUSTON. Follow him on twitter: @PubliusTX