Gilroy
– The city’s assistant police chief abruptly resigned Tuesday
after learning that his part-time employment contract violates
state pension regulations.
Gilroy – The city’s assistant police chief abruptly resigned Tuesday after learning that his part-time employment contract violates state pension regulations.
Assistant Police Chief Lanny Brown failed to comply with a requirement that public employees have a “bona fide” break in service before returning to work after retiring. Under the California Public Employee Retirement System, Brown should have left service for 60 days following his Jan. 11 retirement from full-time duty before returning on a part-time basis to help smooth the department’s transition to a new headquarters.
“Starting today, I’m no longer employed by the city,” Brown said Tuesday. “At the end of 60 days, it’s out of my control whether (the city) wants to consider bringing me back.”
The announcement comes as the police department prepares to execute a long-planned move from its Rosanna Street headquarters into a sprawling facility one block west. The resignation also caps months of controversy over the retirement deals that Brown and Police Chief Gregg Giusiana struck with City Hall late last year. Both chiefs agreed to postpone their full departure from active duty by retiring and “returning” to work as part-time employees. Such arrangements are commonplace among California public agencies, but the failure to inform city council members and rank-and-file police of the deals sparked weeks of controversy and inspired new standards for communicating changes in department heads.
Prior to his retirement, CalPERS advisors and the Gilroy Human Resources Department informed Brown that he could begin collecting pension payments and part-time wages from the city without a break in service. On April 6, two weeks after council held a policy meeting that laid to rest the retirement scandal, a CalPERS retirement specialist advised Brown and city staff that the city erred in allowing him to retire and return to work without a break in service.
“What frustrates me is that I feel that I practiced such high levels of due diligence by going to three different (CalPERS) seminars,” said Brown, who began planning his retirement last fall. “Not only was this not presented, but even after full disclosure, it wasn’t acknowledged that this was an issue.”
Police Chief Gregg Giusiana acted on the same advice but does not have to resign immediately based on differences in his career history.
“I felt bad for Lanny because he had some plans for how he wanted to walk out the door,” Giusiana said. “It’s certainly disruptive to the organization because we were planning on a smooth transition. We have to reprioritize some of the things we’re doing. Most of the energy that Lanny was going to be expending over the next couple of months was going to be around the move. Now others will have to take up that load.”
Giusiana, who retired from active duty in November and returned as a part-time employee, does not face the same “break in service” requirement that triggered Brown’s resignation. The discrepancy stems from a CalPERS mandate that employees who retire before their “normal retirement age” must leave work for 60 days before returning to their jobs as part-time employees.
Confusion arose in Gilroy because the agency uses differing standards to determine normal retirement age. CalPERS allows both chiefs to begin collecting pensions at age 50 since that is the normal retirement threshold for Gilroy police. But when enforcing the break-in-service requirement, the agency pegs normal retirement age to the highest retirement age in place among all the agencies that ever employed the person.
Giusiana, 52, spent his entire career in Gilroy so the distinction had no bearing on his situation. But Brown spent the first decade of his career in Novato, where the normal retirement age remains 55. That higher age is the operative one for Brown, who now finds himself abruptly out of work after 22 years in the city police department.
CalPERS retirement specialist Liz Burke did not return a call Tuesday asking for clarification. In an April 6 letter, she gave Brown the option of rolling back his retirement and paying back his pension checks, but he decided to avoid the “bureaucratic nightmare” of “unretiring.” Instead, he plans to take the next six months to a year to “explore his options.” Brown said he will use his free time to instruct Bay Area police on emergency response and high speed car pursuits.
CalPERS dismissed Brown’s offer to pass up his part-time pay and perform his assistant chief duties on a volunteer basis, according to City Administrator Jay Baksa. Brown had planned to stay on as a part-time employee until July 1.
“It’s a very complex system, one in which the CalPERS employees … sometimes don’t even know what the regulations are,” Baksa said. “But this regulation of not allowing somebody to even volunteer their time is counterintuitive. That just goes against common sense.”
