For over six years, California’s public pension system has attempted to recover retirement payments made to a group of annuitants who ran afoul of the state’s post-retirement employment laws when they worked for various local governments after retiring.
By working for various cities, these annuitants should have been reinstated as active members of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System and, thus, making regular pension payments instead of receiving them, the agency maintained. The annuitants, and the local governments they worked for, disagreed.
The long, legal saga concluded this month, following a January decision by an administrative law judge. CalPER and the retired annuitants reached a settlement this month that restored their pension benefits to their original allowances and required CalPERS to pay any increases to their benefit that they might have missed while the case was being litigated.
“They could call it a settlement, but basically they agreed to implement everything that the ALJ ordered,” Scott Kivel, an attorney who represents several of the retirees and local governments involved in the case, said in an interview.
The settlement represents a major win for the small group of retirees and the cities they briefly worked with, but the broader confusion around post-retirement employment laws, and when they can be enforced, remains unresolved.
On Tuesday, the CalPERS board of administration pulled an item from its agenda in which trustees would have...
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