Please Don't Mention Their Pension

Pension reform is lucrative for former Capitol insiders (excerpts)

Capitol Weekly, 3/17/11, Malcolm Maclachlan

The consulting company hired by Republican lawmakers known as the “GOP 5” to do research on reforming public employee pensions signed a similar but much larger contract with a conservative pension reform group last month. The company, Capitol Matrix Consulting, is headed by Mike Genest, who served as finance director for former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Matrix’s other two principals, Brad Williams and Pete Schaafsma, also are well-known in the Capitol as top-level financial analysts.

All three men, incidentally, have state pensions worth more than $100,000 a year — though Genest points out that he spent years working for pension reform when he was a capitol staffer and still “a long way from my own pension.”...

Capitol Matrix signed another consulting contract in mid-February. This one was for $150,000 with the California Foundation for Fiscal Responsibility (CFFR), according to the group’s president, Marcia Fritz. CFFR publishes the website CaliforniaPensionReform.com, and the contract called for a wide-ranging report for ways to save money by reforming public pensions...

Fritz and her group considered two bids. The other, from the RAND Corporation, was for $300,000. Capitol Matrix, she said, was able to do the work for less because of their intimate institutional knowledge about the state’s pension systems...

Meanwhile, there has been some speculation about where Fritz’s group got the money for the contract after she got up at a pension reform conference hosted by the Bay Area Council on March 10 and mentioned a “large out-of-state donor.” She declined to identify the donor...

CalPERS records show that Genest is receiving $125,549.76 in annual pension. Schaafsma is getting $137,354.69 and Williams $109,313.76. Schaafsma’s final year salary was $161,124 as a chief GOP fiscal consultant in the Assembly. Genest got a bump in his last year as Finance Director, making $211,788 in 2009 after bringing home $177,448 the year before.

However, Genest also pointed out: “We could have made a lot more money in the private sector. We are making more money.” ...

Full story at http://capitolweekly.net/article.php?_c=zkea2ioq2upwb2&xid=zkdbawoegklgrg&done=.zkear8a52wz2pl

Don't know why anyone would be excited by some men who are so good with money in the private sector: