The Union Hall will be relocating on Monday, Juy 13, 2009 to 3720 Folsom Blvd., Sacramento CA 95816, Old Chemical 4. Our phone numbers will stay the same.

The Firefighters Burn Institute will occupy the current building on Stockton Blvd. soon after.

Our office will be closed on Friday, July 10th  when the phone lines and computers will be out of service in preparation for the move.

The CalPERS Board of Administration today approved an overall 2.9 percent increae in health care premiums for its emembers-- the lowest increase achieved inits health care program in 14 years. Rates for individuals and families ca be found on the CalPERS Web site at www.calpers.ca.gov

"These rates were the result of better health care practices by our members and hard work by our Board and staff," said Rob Feckner, President of the CalPERS Board. "This is good news for our members who are facing furloughs, pay cuts and difficult economic times."

CalPERS basic HMO plans will increae by 3.4 percent, basic PPO plans by 3.3 percent and a 1 percent increase for the pension fund's association pllans serving highway patrol, correctional and peace officers. Members in Medicare plans will se an average increase of 1.1 percent.

Decisions and actions by the CalPERS Board and staff saved the program more than $600 million and fended off rate increases that would have been near 9 percent. The final rates reflect:

• Lower use of health care services and more extensive use of generic drugs b members and their families compared to previous years,.
• Tougher negotiations by CalPERS staff and proactive healthcare management by the health plans and their providers.
• The results of many years of the Board's strategic decisions which resulted in cost reductions and better health outcomes, including the removal of hgih cost hospitals, emphasis on health and disease management programs, the addition of NetValue and PERS Select low cost "high performance" health plans, a new lower cost pilot program between Blue Shield, Catholic Healthcare West, and Hill Physicians Medical Group that will be available to CalPERS members in the greater Sacramento region, and stronger medical and pharmacy management.

Today's action introduces a new Blue Shield Medicare Advantage Part D plan in nine counties including Fresno, Kern, Los Angeles, Madera, Orange, San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo, Ventura and parts of Riverside; and brings the successful Blue Shield's NetValue plan to four more counties including Imperial, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, and parts of San Mateo. It also follows on the heels of months of negotiations with health plan patners and research into new plan options that carried lower premiums but higher co-payments for office visits, prescriptions and deductibles.

"We looked at a number of plan options in an effort to provide more choices to our members, "said Priya Mathur, Chair of the Health Benefits Committee. "While these options have merit, we need more time to find choices that will be cost effective over the long-term and ensure we meet the health care needs of our members."

For more information, please visit the CalPERS Web site at www.calpers.ca.gov

Online Checklist Helps CalPERS Members Plan For Retirement

CalPERS members who are thinking about retiring in the near future can use the new, online CalPERS Retirement Planning Checklist. The checklist will provide members information starting one year before retirement to the retirement date. It gives quick access to retirement planning tools, publications, forms, and other important resources all in one place.

You can find the new checklist in the ‘For Members’ area of CalPERS On-Line. Go to Retirement Benefits, Retirement & Financial Planning, and then Retirement Planning Checklist.

The page includes a checklist of things that members should do, and the timeframe in which they should be done. This online checklist is interactive, offering members quick access to other pages within the CalPERS Web site.

SACRAMENTO -- The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS) today launched a new Web site called my|CalPERS that allows CalPERS members to access their personal account information and to manage their retirement, health benefits, and financial planning needs.
my|CalPERS is a fabulous customer service enhancement for CalPERS members," said CalPERS Chief Executive Officer Fred Buenrostro. It allows members to get their own information from their service credit years, to their current mailing address on file, to information about the health plans they've chosen. Members can also change their mailing address and obtain a retirement benefit estimate."
With my|CalPERS, active and retired CalPERS members can instantly and independently get the information they need and conduct CalPERS transactions online.
my|CalPERS puts members in control because they can conveniently access and view their personal CalPERS information online anytime, anywhere.
my|CalPERS allows members to track the status of their CalPERS transactions such as service credit purchases and disability retirement applications, along with accessing the most current information in their account.
The site also provides news updates, CalPERS Member Home Loan rates, and the asset value of the CalPERS pension fund.
The launch of my|CalPERS establishes the platform for future CalPERS online member self services, a part of CalPERS effort to improve customer service by making more products and services available online. Additional features will be added over the next year.
To use my|CalPERS or get more information about CalPERS, visit the CalPERS On-Line Web site at www.calpers.ca.gov.
CalPERS, with more than $245 billion in assets, is the largest public pension fund in the U.S., administering retirement and health benefits on behalf of 2,600 California State and local government employers for 1.5 million active and retired California public employees and their families.

John Lockhart Steely was laid to rest on Tuesday, April 12th at Mt. Vernon Memorial Park at 8201 Greenback Lane, Fair Oaks.  Remembrances may be made to the Firefighters Burn Institute.

John Steely, a member of Local 522's Executive Board's address to the Sacramento City Council on October 1, 1970:

"For a number of years, gentlemen I was Secretary-Treasurer of the Sacramento Fire Fighters and for the majority of those years I was chairman of our salary commitee and involved in other efforts which we now call negotiations. Out of my experience during those years, there has emerged what I think are several basic trusts which should always be postulated as the basis for any honest and fair wage and hour negotiating procedures in City service. I would like to read them to you, one by one, as they have evolved.

1. Providing honest wages and working hours constitutes the normal cost of doing City business.

2. If city employees are to be considered not to have the right to strike, then the City has reciprocal duty not to take advantage of this fact.

3.  To the extent a public employee is underpaid or is required to work excessive hours, he is compelled to contribute an amount of unpaid labor to the cost of government in addition to his regular taxes, and in effect, subsidize the taxpayer at large.

4. This is very important! To be fair, salaries and other working conditions must be geared to an external, objective, constant standard, whether you call it a formula or compulsary arbitration or whatever, which completely renders salaries immune from political pressures, so that at all times the administration, the public, and the employees know wehre they stand. As a corollary to this, I should saly, that on the employees' side, at all times it should be their practice to make their demands reasonable; and it has been our practice of the fire fighters to make demands which are fair and can be substantiated by the facts.

5. This is an important truth which is very seldom recognized by people in city service -- it is not the fire fighters, councilmen, or personnel officers who determine a fire fighter's duties. It is the nature of fire itself which dictates the terms of that employment.

Now, with respect with that last observation, I want to say to you that it is a source of great discomfort to us to be hired by the City of Sacramento to work in it's fire department on the terms of employment that the city itself requires, which may or may not include fighting fires one percent of the time, or doing this or doing that as some bright, eager, ambitious personnel officers like to dissect our job and break it down to the various things.  The City hires us to be full-time and full-paid fire fighters; and as long as you get the full value of our time, you are obligated to pay us for the full time. It doesn't make a bit of difference if fires never occur at all. If you hire us on those terms, you'll pay us. It is just like your policy of fire insurance. You don't say I"ll pay the premiums every ten years because we might have a fire once in ten years. Either you pay it all the time or you don't get protection.

Now I want to say to you that things are at a very serious turn with reference to the fire fighters state of mind and the City of Sacramento. We are not happy with cerain conditions and we are resolved to do something about them.

In the last few hours we have been insulted, we have been betrayed, we have been maligned by statements that have been issued from this City Hall. Such things as that we will "turn in false alarms" and "hire good squad fire fighters from Oakland" to come up here and do dirty work. You have insulted us and every fire fighter in the State of California. I want to say to you that we do have friends in the fire service throughout the State and every fire fighter in this county is a friend. If things come to the worst, I am sure that we can rely upon their friendship.

You speak of loyalty. We speak of loyalty. We think of it day and night when we slog in the muck and everything else to put out every spark and every piece of horse manure to prevent a rekindle. We think of loyalty, we act. But our people know the difference between loyalty and submission to exploitation, submission to tyranny, to have the product of our labor extorted and unpaid, and I have been commissioned to tell you in no uncertain language, that we have come to the point beyond which we will tolerate no more of the insults and no more of the impasse.

There is yet time, if you move quickly, for minds to meet on the field of reason. We feel that it is your duty as the governing body of this city to ascertain independently for yourselves, the honest facts relative to the situation of wages and to our requests as to a reduction in hours and holidays. You can do it in two hours on the telephone by calling the personnel offices in the 15 cities we were formerly compared with or the six cities you compare us with now, to determine what holidays their people enjoy and what they are paid, or will be paid, in the near future. Perhaps it is on the file in your personnel office this minute. But if you do not move, and we feel the onus is upon you if you do not, I have been instructed to tell you that the Sacramento Fire Fighters of Local 522 stand poised on the brink of the Rubicon and we intend to cross.