Californians Back Capping Public-Employee Pensions, Poll Says
A majority of California voters support capping the pensions of current and future public employees to balance the state’s budget, a poll shows.
Voters support the idea 70 percent to 22 percent, according to the poll released yesterday by the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles Times.
“The support for everything we tested suggests that pensions and public-employee benefits are going to be an important part of the state’s political dialogue for years to come,” Dan Schnur, the poll director, said in a statement.
Rising pension costs are straining the budgets of U.S. states and cities that are already grappling with income- and sales-tax revenue that hasn’t fully recovered from the longest recession since the Great Depression. Governor Jerry Brown, a 73-year-old Democrat, and lawmakers in Sacramento have passed some budget cuts, reducing the fiscal 2012 deficit to about $15.4 billion.
San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed and San Francisco Mayor Edwin Lee said last week that they expect proposals overhauling municipal pension programs to go before voters in their cities in November. Both cited the escalating costs of current retirement systems.
Of those surveyed for the poll released yesterday, 68 percent supported increasing the share that future and current public employees contribute to their pension and retirement benefits, while 22 percent opposed that idea, according to the results. The respondents were split on whether to cut pension and retirement benefits for future and current public workers, with 50 percent supporting the step and 41 percent opposing it.
More than half, 52 percent, backed raising the age when public employees can retire and begin collecting pension benefits, while 38 percent opposed that idea.
The survey of 1,503 registered California voters was conducted April 7-17 and has a margin for error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points. The pension questions were posed to about half of the respondents.
To contact the reporter on this story: Alison Vekshin in San Francisco at avekshin@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Tannenbaum at mtannen@bloomberg.net.
Rate These Stories
Rate this Page