Petition Signature Collection:
I have prepared the petitions for group signing. There are basically three of them, one to UC, one to DOE and the third to the Politicians of your choice. If you would like to know what we will be asking you to sign, you should look them over. They are posted on the LLNS Web Site. I have also prepared the individual petitions for those who canŐt make the group signing.
On the left side of retiree web page, http://home.comcast.net/~jrequa/retiree.htm,
just after the links to the status reports is a link to the petitions. That takes you to a page with links to both the group and individual petitions. There are also instructions on how to chose and download the appropriate individual petitions. The Read Me file found with the downloaded individual petitions has additional instructions.
The UC Dialog:
Ms. Lapp has decided that we have been talking to the wrong person as shown below.
On Apr 8, 2009, at
1:45 PM, Katherine Lapp wrote:
Dr. Mr. Requa.
Thank you for your email regarding the above caption
issue. Given that you raise legal issues I am forwarding your email to
the UC Office of General Counsel and have asked the General CounselŐs Office to
review the facts and circumstances that you have identified. I can commit
that your concerns will be dealt with seriously and, for efficiency and
clarity, ask that future correspondence on this issue be conducted through that
office. Thank you again for bringing this to our attention.
Sincerely,
Katie Lapp
That puts me back talking to Jeff Blair, the UC lawyer I first complained to last August. Hopefully he will take me more seriously than he did the last time. I sent him an email describing my view of the situation:
On Apr 12, 2009, at
3:39 PM, LLNL Retiree wrote:
Hi Jeff,
As the
only lawyer to get a copy of KathieŐs email, I assume you are the public face
of the UC Office of General Counsel. If not please forward this email to its
appropriate destination.
Since
you did not seem to understand my problem the last time I talked to you, I will
try to clarify it. I have spent a great deal of time researching the issue and
believe I can state it clearly.
Lets
start with the short form of my assertions and you can point out where I have
gone wrong:
I am
able to support these assertions in detail if necessary.
There
are several side issues that tend to obscure the facts of the situation.
If you
would like to discuss these issues in person, I will be happy to accommodate
you.
I
believe that this issue must be settled in time for the involved UC retirees to
be included in the UC open enrollment process this fall. The information I have
indicates that it is unlikely that LLNS will be able to offer Kaiser coverage
this fall. About one third of the 5400 retirees involved are covered by Kaiser.
Dumping about 1000 retirees from Kaiser onto other Livermore Tri-Valley medical
providers in a single day is not an event that the existing infrastructure is
prepared to handle. I am not sure who would ultimately be held responsible for
such an event but UC, DOE and LLNS are all likely candidates.
Until
you either convince me that I am wrong or you admit I am right, I plan to
continue recruiting new members for UCLRG and petitioning appropriate people
for redress.
Time is
of the essence,
Joe
I have received a note back that he would like a meeting and that his administrative assistant would set it up.
On the Legal Front:
I have been keeping the lawyers informed of what has been going on. We havenŐt formalized anything yet. Whether or not we need to involve the Judiciary branch of the government may well be determined at my meeting with Jeff.
Now for the Bad News:
Medical benefits may be just the preliminary bout. The main bout could be fighting for our pensions. One of our members brought the following information to my attention:
Gentlemen,
I retired from LLNL in 2006 and I'm a member of UCRP.
At my request, the UC Treasurer's Office sent me some
information about the financial status of the LLNL segment of UCRP.
The information confirms my worse fears about the dire financial
outlook for LLNL retirees.
According to the table on page vii of the the latest UCRP
Actuarial Valuation Report:
http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/regents/regmeet/nov08/f10attach2.pdf
the funded ratio of the LLNL segment of UCRP is down to 90.4%,
while the funded ratio of UCRP as a whole is 103%.
In other words, as things stand now, about 10% of LLNL retirees
are projected to outlive the funds in their segment of UCRP.
This grim picture is only going to get worse in future years
because the LLNL segment has no active members who are contributing to
UCRP. Our segment only has retired and inactive members who are
receiving benefit payments.
LLNL retirees should not expect any help from UCRP as a
whole. According to David Olsen of the UC Treasurer's Office, the LLNL
segment of UCRP is administered separately from the rest of UCRP and no
contributions may flow from the campus-wide segment of UCRP into the LLNL
segment. In his e-mail to me, Mr. Olsen said:
"Contributions and benefit payments which are unique to each segment are
accounted for specifically to each segment."
In other words, the LLNL segment is like a lifeboat that has
been cut adrift from the UCRP mother ship.
Our only hope is that DOE/NNSA will honor its commitment to
reimburse UC for any funding shortfalls in UCRP. Don't hold your
breath waiting for that to happen.
Dennis Elchesen
A quick look at the numbers has the LANL segment fully funded at 103% after being separated from the UC segment for 33 months and the LLNL segment funded at 90% after being separated for 9 months. That looks to me like we have been cheated from the start. I havenŐt looked at the LLNS contract in detail to see what it says about pension funds. If DOE has promised to provide additional needed funding funding, it may be just a matter of timing. If not the situation becomes much more serious. The funding levels mentioned above were based on July 1, 2008 values. I am sure they will be much worse when they are reexamined this coming July.
I have offered all of the UC retirees that have indicated to me that believe they to be power players a chance to pursue the problem. So far, I have not had a single taker. If you are a power player I have missed and you are willing to step into the breach, please let me know, otherwise I may be stuck with it by default. If I am, because the problem is not as time sensitive as medical, I plan to ignore the issue while we complete political petitioning on the medical and I get a reading of where UC stands on medical from Jeff. After that, it will take a fair amount of time and digging to determine what the best path forward is,
Care to Exit?
You signed up to pursue fair treatment for medical benefits, not pension benefits. You have the option of not supporting efforts to preserve our Pension benefits. If you would prefer not to support those efforts, please let me know.