Brown says pension reform still on his agenda, but is it?

Jerry Brown made an appearance in San Francisco last week and patted himself on the back for “what’s been accomplished” during his second governorship.

“But that doesn’t mean we are finished,” Brown quickly added. “There are some real things that you can always read about in the paper that haven’t been done. We’re not finished with pension reform. We still got to do much more there. It’s going to take a while, but that’s still on the agenda.”

Is it?

Four years ago, Brown proposed a fairly modest reform of public employee pensions but, as is his wont, settled for less than a half-a-loaf when the Democrat-controlled Legislature, under pressure from unions, balked at a major overhaul.

Officially, the token reform would save taxpayers about $30 billion in non-teacher pension costs over 30 years, but that’s only 6 percent of the $500 billion they are expected to pay out for pensions over that period, as pension cost guru David Crane points out.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/politics-columns-blogs/dan-walters/article113008058.html