Moorlach Eyes Monumental Task: O.C. Pensions

Orange County Treasurer John Moorlach is nothing if not meticulous. You’ve got to be if you’re intending to visit all of the state’s historic landmarks in one lifetime.

At 50, Moorlach, maybe, can count on another half-century to finish the job. He visited 24 on a recent vacation with his wife and son in the western Sierra to reach 1,001.

The number of sites apparently is hard to agree on. While some devotees put the figure at roughly 1,100, a state official told me Wednesday the figure is 1,043.

Either way, the task sounds eminently doable for Moorlach. He won’t have the rest of his life, however, to track another of his passions: dealing with what he says is the county’s potentially ruinous pension system.

And make no mistake, when Moorlach joins the Board of Supervisors in a few months, he plans to attack the pension and retiree medical-benefits situation with the same vigor he brought to his campaign for treasurer in 1994. He charged that then-Treasurer Robert Citron’s investment practices jeopardized the county. Not enough people listened to Moorlach: The incumbent won reelection easily in June 1994, and the county declared bankruptcy by year’s end.

These days, I picture Moorlach slowly donning his battle garb for the ensuing fight. Even if his four colleagues on the board see things his way, employee unions likely will not. They strongly supported his June election opponent in a race that Moorlach won with 69.5% of the vote.

“They already shot their cannonball,” Moorlach says, in response to my question of how he thinks he’ll deal with them. “To be honest, I’m a forgiving man and know we have to work closely together. Without [county employees], you can’t do the work, right? But I have to educate them, too, and they’ve got to get off their mean streak and start talking hard dollars.”

Moorlach is a numbers guy, but well aware that most of the rest of us are not. That was part of his problem in 1994, when average Joes simply didn’t warm up to warnings about “derivatives” and “reverse repurchase agreements.” Similarly, he knows pension-related conversations about “defined benefits” and “unfunded actuarial accrued liability” aren’t likely to captivate the public.

But that is the task, and he thinks the recent spate of stories from around the country detailing corporate and governmental pension problems signal a growing public concern.

Moorlach thinks his board predecessors have been much too generous and much less discerning about the pension effects than they should have been. Still, he considers himself “a team player” not itching for a fight and someone who will use his accounting experience to present the facts of life to his colleagues and the public.

That may carry him only so far. Once he and his board colleagues start doing the number-crunching and start figuring out what, if anything, to do about the problem, full battle armor may be the uniform of the day.

If people can’t agree on the number of historical sites in California, they sure won’t agree on how to address the pension and benefits problem.

With that prospect of unpleasantness, I ask Moorlach why he ran. He could have been reelected treasurer in perpetuity. Besides, he takes a pay cut to become a supervisor.

“It’s one of my passions,” he says.

Which doesn’t mean that he thinks his board tenure will be as fun as photographing historical landmarks.

He fears what a recession could do to the county portfolio and says, almost in passing, that the next few years “could be the worst time to be a supervisor.”

Still, there’s that thing called opportunity. “Orange County is one one-hundredth of the country,” he says.

“We are significant in the country’s population. If we can address some issues and work collaboratively with the unions and the board to come up with some resolutions that make our costs manageable and predictable and that benefit employees and still make us competitive with the private sector, we have an opportunity to create a model for the rest of the country.”

Hey, a man’s got to have goals.

Although Moorlach jokes that his bankruptcy warnings were his fifteen minutes of fame, I predict he’ll stretch that to a half-hour when he settles into his board seat.

I also predict that shortly thereafter, he’ll start counting the days until the next family vacation and bagging historical marker No. 1002.