John Upton

Supervisor Sean Elsbernd told skeptical pension maverick Jeff Adachi: "There are more numbers to come."

Updated June 24 at 1:30 p.m. with more detail on status of mayor's plan

Escaping much notice when Mayor Edwin Lee unveiled his pension-reform proposal last month was a change in the make-up of the obscure board that oversees the Health Services System, the entity that provides San Francisco employees, retirees and their dependents with health care. 

More than 105,000 people are covered through HSS.

Karen Breslin, former president of HSS, currently serves as on its board. Breslin and a long line of retirees spoke out Wednesday as the rules committee of the Board of Supervisors debated the mayor's pension proposal. 

Under that plan, the city would appoint four members to the HSS's seven-member board. The city currently appoints three, so the shift would enable the city to exert more influence over the workings of HSS. 

"This is a total takeover by the city," Breslin said at the hearing, adding that placing control of HSS in the hands of City Hall was "dangerous." She recounted an incident in which the mayor's office pressured the director of HSS to include a health insurer in the plan because the company made donations of "a ton of money" to city officials. 

"Who is going to oversee the insurance companies if the city appointees have total control of this board?" Breslin asked Supervisors Sean Elsbernd, Mark Farrell and Jane Kim, who make up the Rules Committee. None asked her questions, though retirees in the audience applauded as she left the podium. 

Kay Walker, a retired city social worker with Service Employees International Union Local 1021, which represents about half of the city's 26,000 employees, complained about retirees being "locked out" of the pension reform discussions. She said some provisions, chiefly the elimination of a supplemental cost-of-living adjustment to retiree payments, would leave "thousands of people in the toilet."

Bob Muscat, executive director of Professional & Technical Engineers Local 21 and an active participant in the discussions that resulted in the mayor's proposal, spoke in its defense. "This is an extraordinary document, something we can all be proud of," he told the Supervisors.

Jeff Adachi, the city public defender who is gathering signatures to place his own, competing pension-reform initiative on the November ballot, also spoke. One middle-aged woman in the audience hissed softly as Adachi took the podium. 

Adachi announced that he has collected the 47,000 voter signatures required to win a place on the ballot. He said his plan saved the city $500 million more than the mayor's plan over a 10-year period. "The current so-called consensus plan falls far short of the savings the city needs," Adachi said. 

Adachi's assertions seemed to irk Elsbernd, the lead sponsor of the mayor's consensus plan.

The city's controller's cost-savings estimates for both Adachi's and the mayor's plan as yet reflect only the savings from increased employee contributions to the pension fund. Elsbernd asked Adachi hold off making comparisons until the controller has issued cost-savings estimates for other elements of the mayor's plan, including changes to retirees' supplemental cost-of-living adjustments; the value of changing a generous "vesting retirement" program for new employees who leave city employment before reaching retirement age; and, starting in 2016, current employees making contributions into the trust fund set up to pay for retiree health care. The mayor's plan also includes transferring about 1,000 city employees who now participate in the state CalPERS retirement program to the city's own retirement fund, which is expected to yield additional savings, since the payments over and above an employee's salary that the city must make to the city retirement plan are significantly less than what CalPERS requires. 

Lecturing Adachi as if he were a child, he repeatedly insisted: "There are more numbers to come."