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San Diego Pension Initiative Shot Down By PERB
San Diego's firefighters and other public workers won a huge victory in the fight to overturn last year's pension-slashing initiative, Measure B.
The state Public Employment Relations Board ruled this week that Measure B violated the collective bargaining rights of San Diego workers and should be invalidated. Measure B eliminated defined benefit pensions for new employees and imposed new restrictions on existing workers. It was placed on the ballot by then-Mayor Jerry Sanders, who sought to get around collective bargaining law by filing the measure as a "private citizen".
"The Mayor, under the color of his elective office ... undertook to launch a pension reform initiative, raised money in support of the campaign, helped craft the language and content of the initiative, and gave his weighty endorsement to it, all the while denying the unions an opportunity to meet and confer over his policy determination," wrote Shawn Cloughesy, PERB's chief administrative law judge.
CLICK HERE TO READ THE PERB RULING
If it stands, the PERB ruling could have far-reaching implications for other so-called pension reform measures, including the explicitly illegal San Jose pension "reform" measure.