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City Hall Dispute Continues Over Pension Debt

By Alison St John / Reporter,  KPBS Public Broadcasting
Published October 2, 2007 at 6:52 AM PDT
This story was published more than 17 years ago.

The political tussle between San Diego's city attorney and the mayor continues at City Hall. Mike Aguirre accused Jerry Sanders Monday of ignoring a mountain of pension debt and building a molehill of

City Hall Dispute Continues Over Pension Debt

The political tussle between San Diego's city attorney and the mayor continues at City Hall. Mike Aguirre accused Jerry Sanders Monday of ignoring a mountain of pension debt and building a molehill of a case to discredit him. But the mayor's office fired back. KPBS reporter Alison St John has more.

The mayor will ask the city council next week to hire outside attorneys to resolve a dispute over pension benefits. Last week the mayor held a press conference to say the city may have to pay millions in pension benefits that should have been discontinued - but continued being paid because Aguirre failed to change the municipal code. 

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Aguirre called a press conference this week and accused the mayor of using the dispute over tens of millions of dollars as a distraction from the bigger issue: the hundreds of millions of dollars in benefits Aguirre believes were illegally granted to a greedy workforce.

Aguirre: We have to restore our civil service to being a public interest oriented workforce and not a mercenary workforce. The mayor promised he would do that and now having not made the hard decisions he is loosing his nerve.

Mayor Sanders is in Washington DC, but his Chief Financial Officer, Jay Goldstone, said

Aguirre had his chance to roll back the benefits and failed.

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Goldstone: We were very, very hopeful that he would be successful in his lawsuits and roll back these benefits. Now he is asking us to ignore the courts, step in where he has failed and not pay the benefits that would open us up to a lawsuit by the employees and we're not convinced we would win it.

Goldstone says the mayor believes it is worth fighting the case of the benefits that should have been discontinued, but it will take an outside attorney to win it. 

Alison St John, KPBS News.

Alison St John
Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.
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