A union complaint accusing San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed of exaggerating the city’s pension problem hit a roadblock Tuesday when a city ethics commission lawyer concluded the allegations wouldn’t violate city laws under the commission’s jurisdiction.
The San Jose Elections Commission, which reviews complaints about alleged violations of city campaign, ethics and lobbying rules, is scheduled to consider the complaint at its Wednesday meeting.
But Mike Moye, an attorney with the Hanson Bridgett law firm in San Francisco, which evaluates complaints for the commission, said “we find no cause to conduct an investigation as the complaint fails to allege facts” that would violate the municipal code “for which the commission has jurisdiction to act.”
Christopher Platten, the union lawyer who filed the complaint last week, said he wasn’t surprised and that employees would ask the City Council to refer the complaint to an independent investigator to determine whether the mayor or others violated city policies. Moye noted that council members may seek a hearing on complaints against the mayor and other council members.
“I think the council has an obligation under its own policies to investigate misleading statements of material fact,” Platten said.
The complaint accused Reed, city Retirement Services Director Russell Crosby and one of his former staffers, Michael Moehle, of overstating worst-case projections last year that San Jose’s retirement costs could hit $650 million by 2015, stampeding workers into unnecessary concessions.
The complaint said Crosby and Moehle knew the figure wasn’t based on independent analysis and even advised the mayor not to use it but that Reed continued to cite it as he sought support for a controversial June ballot measure to shrink the city’s retirement costs. The unions argue such a measure would be illegal.
“Why didn’t the mayor tell the council that the $650 million dollar projection was off the top of Russell Crosby’s head and that he was told not to use the faulty projection?” unions representing police, firefighters and other workers asked in a statement Tuesday.
Reed has called the union complaint frivolous “political theater.” He said the $650 million figure was just a potential scenario always cited with a smaller official $400 million projection, a figure now expected to drop because of last year’s layoffs and pay cuts. Reed said budget cuts and concession talks stemmed from actual retirement costs that more than tripled in a decade to $245 million for pensions and free health care premiums for many city retirees.
But Reed has maintained that the $650 million figure is “still a reasonable estimate,” citing a Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research report in December — which unions also criticized — that stated: “in the pessimistic scenario, city retirement expenditures increase $663.8 million above 2012 levels.”
Contact John Woolfolk at 408-975-9346.
