HUNTINGTON BEACH : Robitaille Fires Back in Pension Uproar

City Councilman Earle Robitaille, in his first public meeting since state auditors accused him of improperly inflating his former salary to pad his pension payment, lashed out at critics.

In a harshly worded attack, Robitaille, a former Huntington Beach police chief, called his critics “harebrained” and “witless” and repeated his contention of innocence.

Meanwhile, Councilwoman Linda Moulton-Patterson on Tuesday asked City Administrator Michael T. Uberuaga to issue a report to the council detailing how the city calculates retirement benefits and how other cities figure them. Uberuaga said he will prepare such a report within two weeks.

In an audit completed recently by state Controller Gray Davis’ staff, Robitaille was among 16 recent Huntington Beach retirees accused of artificially inflating their last-year salary to increase their pensions.

According to the audit, Robitaille improperly figured in a car allowance and vacation pay, adding nearly $12,000 to his final-year salary.

Robitaille had previously denied any wrongdoing, and city officials said they followed guidelines set by the state Public Employees Retirement System.

Huntington Beach Tomorrow, a citizens group that says it includes 1,000 members, has led a local campaign against Robitaille and other retirees accused in the audit.

At Tuesday’s council meeting, the group’s president, David Sullivan, repeated its demand that the city halt the practice of “salary spiking” and that the accused retirees refund extra pension earnings to the retirement system.

After Sullivan’s comments, Robitaille called Sullivan “a pompous nincompoop who comes up here every two weeks or so dumping on everybody he can dump on, knowing little about what he is talking about.”

He also questioned that the group is as large as it claims to be and used a sexual slang term to describe one of Huntington Beach Tomorrow’s meetings.

Sullivan had “better be ready to defend himself in court if he wants to keep up the accusations . . . because I’ll go to court,” Robitaille said.

He also assailed the Huntington Beach Independent newspaper, which has run a series of stories and editorials criticizing the retirees accused of “spiking.”

Editors of the newspaper and members of Huntington Beach Tomorrow, Robitaille said, “have taken it upon themselves to think that they can come down here and whipsaw public employees because they’re public employees. Well, I did my 32 years as a public employee. I’m no longer a second-class citizen. And I don’t intend to put up with one second of our witless, harebrained trash that you come down here with.”

Sullivan said he is not worried about a lawsuit. In a prepared statement Thursday, he took exception to Robitaille’s reference to a sex act to describe a Huntington Beach Tomorrow meeting.

“We don’t talk trash, we talk facts,” Sullivan said. “Referring to a sex act in a public meeting with children present, as Mr. Robitaille did, is talking trash. His unsubstantiated attack on me and the press was unworthy of a councilman.”

William Lobdell, editor of the weekly Huntington Beach Independent, in Thursday’s edition published a reaction to Robitaille’s tirade and other criticisms leveled by City Hall at the paper in recent weeks.

While acknowledging that “at times we’ve overstepped our bounds,” Lobdell defended the paper’s right to voice its opinions.