By ELIZABETH LESLY STEVENS
Published: July 24, 2010
Two years ago, a San Francisco accountant, Craig Weber, noticed a flier posted at the Mission Bay public library. It sought volunteers for the civil grand jury, a panel of 19 citizens empowered to investigate local government.
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Adithya Sambamurthy/The Bay Citizen
Craig Weber is part of a dispute involving a pension fund proposal.
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Dennis Herrera, the San Francisco city attorney.
Mr. Weber decided to sign up. He and his fellow jurors spent hundreds of unpaid hours examining San Francisco’s public employee pension fund. On June 24, they issued a report titled, “Pension Tsunami.” It warned that the soaring obligations “jeopardize the city’s future.”
Mr. Weber, 59, is a self-described “nobody” who graduated from Lowell High and the University of California, Berkeley. But he is no longer unknown. His volunteerism has placed him directly in the cross hairs of unions vigorously fighting efforts to overhaul the pension fund. The unions say they have made huge concessions in recent years.
They accuse Mr. Weber of abusing his power as a grand juror by supporting a pension-reform initiative sponsored by the city’s public defender, Jeff Adachi. That measure would greatly increase pension contributions from city employees.
A union lawyer, Peter Saltzman, stood on the steps of City Hall on Thursday and declared, “Weber has impugned the integrity of the civil grand jury.” Mr. Saltzman called for civil and criminal investigations into whether Mr. Weber violated conflict-of-interest laws or improperly used public resources for political purposes.
Mr. Weber said he had done nothing wrong, and he seems astonished by the political storm swirling around him.
Mr. Weber said he went to the city attorney in March to ask if he could work in support of the pension measure while continuing to serve as a grand juror.
The response, he said, was this: “Yes, as long as you don’t present yourself as a member of the grand jury.”
“I was very careful that my grand-jury work was totally separate,” he said.
More than anything, Mr. Weber’s odyssey shows how pension overhaul has become a blood sport — not only in San Francisco but also across the Bay Area, where the issue is convulsing municipalities contending with shrinking resources and rising costs, directly affecting social services.
The situation in San Francisco is serious. The grand jury report noted that the city’s annual pension and health-care costs would more than double, to about $1 billion, by 2014. The city’s entire annual budget is about $6 billion.
“Pension and health benefits enjoyed by San Francisco retirees are unsustainable,” the report said.
The unions have attacked Mr. Adachi and his supporters with ferocity. After a Bay Citizen article last week noting that Mr. Adachi’s pension measure had drawn support from business and civic leaders, including the venture capitalist Michael Moritz, the union described Mr. Moritz as a “billionaire” acting in concert with “cronies” and a “farm team” for Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who advocates pension overhaul at the state level.
“Craig Weber is a good guy,” said Sean Elsbernd, a city supervisor who sits on the board of the city’s pension fund. “Labor is using him as a red herring, to distract from the fundamental problem” of the pension fund’s financial predicament.
Mr. Weber was well into his second year of jury service when he spotted a Nov. 25 op-ed article by Mr. Adachi about the city’s budget crisis and the need for a pension overhaul.
In its January meeting, the pension board determined that the city’s new contribution to the pension fund — a number determined by the fund’s performance and the cost of contractually guaranteed benefits — would be 13.5 percent of each employee’s salary for the 2010-11 fiscal year.
“A huge, huge increase,” said Mr. Weber. The civil grand jury report forecasts that the city’s pension contribution rate may climb to 30 percent in five years.
Around this time, the foreman of the previous year’s grand jury invited Mr. Weber to a meeting with Mr. Adachi, Mr. Elsbernd and another former grand-jury member to talk about pension issues. As Mr. Adachi’s plan for a ballot initiative to require increased contributions from all city employees developed, Mr. Weber said he wished to help.
He asked the City Attorney’s Office in March if acting as a proponent of a pension effort would conflict with his grand-jury role.
“We advised him that, under law, he was not precluded,” the city attorney, Dennis Herrera, said in an interview.
Mr. Weber was cautioned to not “use city resources for a political purpose,” Mr. Herrera said, adding: “I was trying to protect the process, and to protect Mr. Weber. The last thing I want is for the grand jury to run afoul of ethical restrictions.”
Then, Mr. Weber said, Mr. Adachi asked him to act as the treasurer of the overhaul effort and prepare its tax forms. Mr. Weber said that canvassing for signatures one day and preparing the forms were the extent of his active involvement before the grand jury report was issued.
In April, when Mr. Herrera’s office learned of Mr. Weber’s role as treasurer, a call was placed to Judge James McBride, the presiding judge of the San Francisco Superior Court who oversees the civil grand jury. After speaking with Mr. Herrera’s office and meeting with Mr. Weber, Judge McBride was “not then convinced” that a conflict of interest existed, according to a letter from Mr. Herrera to the judge recapping the exchange.
When meeting with Judge McBride, Mr. Weber said he offered to resign from the Adachi effort.
Meanwhile, the grand jury’s focus on compliance with a 2002 amendment to the city charter, Proposition H, was causing tension with Mr. Herrera’s office.
Proposition H enhanced police and firefighters’ pension benefits, but required workers to contribute more if the pension fund stopped running a surplus. The fund was showing a surplus when Proposition H passed in 2002, but has been running a deficit since 2004. The grand jury report asserted that the city had never sought to collect the proposition-mandated additional contributions from employees, and that an unfunded pension liability of $276 million was the result.
On June 8, Mr. Weber sent a letter to Mr. Herrera asking pointed questions about what he said were the city attorney’s responsibilities to enforce Proposition H.
“The issue became that the city attorney did not enforce the city charter,” Mr. Weber said. “That is the controversy. That is the issue the city attorney is trying to avoid.”
Mr. Herrera said it was the role of the pension board, not his office, to determine the proper contribution levels to the pension fund, and he produced a section of the charter to support his view.
Gary Amelio, the executive director of the city’s pension system, says that enforcing Proposition H is not his role, either. “We are not involved in policy or who pays,” said Mr. Amelio, who added that the $13 billion pension fund was 97 percent funded.
Micki Callahan, San Francisco’s human-resources director, said Proposition H’s “requirement to cost-share we believe has been met” in cyclically renegotiated labor agreements. “It is not possible to segregate pension costs when negotiating a labor contract.”
Mr. Herrera did not respond to Mr. Weber’s June 8 letter, but instead sent a letter on June 14 to Judge McBride.
“I have serious concerns,” he wrote, “that Mr. Weber’s dual roles create a conflict of interest, or at least the appearance of a conflict of interest, which could undermine the integrity of any civil grand jury investigation into these issues.”
Mr. Herrera asked Judge McBride to “screen Mr. Weber from any involvement in the civil grand jury’s examination” of the pension issues.
Mr. Herrera now says, “I have not made any allegations about Mr. Weber.”
It is too early to know whether Mr. Herrera, District Attorney Kamala D. Harris or the San Francisco Ethics Commission will heed the unions’ call to investigate Mr. Weber’s activities.
But drawing more public attention to the civil grand jury report may only undermine the unions’ position in the end.
“Craig Weber made a mistake, a political mistake,” said Mr. Elsbernd, the city supervisor, but “labor is making a big mistake.”
Typically, he said, “a grand jury report is read by a few hundred people.”
Not this one, not anymore.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/us/25bcjury.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1
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