On item #1: Income reported by employers to the California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) has specific conditions regulated by Compliance with the Public Employees' Retirement Law (PERL) Government (Gov.) Code and California Code of Regulations (CCR).  A particular requirement surrounds the eligibility and reporting of “special compensation.”  Special compensation is what a member may be paid, in addition to the base regular rate, pursuant to a labor policy (MOU) and is reported in addition to and separately from pay rate. Eligibility of pensionable special compensation is used to calculate retirement benefits and defined by CalPERS.  Uniform allowance, holiday pay, and education pay are a few examples of pay types which are defined as eligible special compensation, however pensionable reporting varies by member type (Classic vs. PEPRA). 

The City has recently been notified by CalPERS that our labor agreements must be slightly modified in order to continue to use special compensation as a calculated retirement benefit.  It has been the City’s intent to provide these pay types as pensionable and we have an established practice of reporting this compensation to CalPERS.  To rectify this matter, language modifications have been made which satisfy the conditions of Gov. Code section 20636 and CCR section 571.    This language update expressly documents the intent and understanding of the existing benefit and does not expand or otherwise create any new benefit for applicable members. 

On item #2:  In light of the above, changes also had to be made to the Agreement for City employees of the General Supervisory and Management Units.  Rather than amend the current Resolution (which has 17 amendments!) it was determined that it would be better to simply start a new Resolution (keeping the start date of July 2019) and incorporate the needed changes described above and use the opportunity to make formatting changes to the Agreement.