Yaroslavsky to Give Up Pension Hike : City Council: He will take the 5% pay raise he had earlier forgone, but says he will give that money to community projects.

Los Angeles City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky pledged Thursday to give up additional pension benefits he would have obtained from his recent, quiet decision to accept a 5% pay increase he publicly rejected last year.

“To ensure that I will receive absolutely no benefit from this action, I have asked the city attorney to draft documents which I will sign waiving the pension increase,” Yaroslavsky said in a news release.

By reversing his earlier refusal to accept the salary boost, Yaroslavsky stood to earn about $500 a year in additional retirement benefits, a “financially insignificant” amount, the councilman said.

Even so, Yaroslavsky added: “I refuse to let even this small benefit cloud the impact of my decision. . . . I pride myself on consistency and on asking of myself the same sacrifice that I ask of others.”

Yaroslavsky on July 22 rescinded his earlier decision to pass up a 5% pay increase that council members were entitled to receive beginning Jan. 1.

In November, 1993, Councilwoman Laura Chick had unveiled a plan--enthusiastically endorsed by Yaroslavsky, the council’s budget committee chairman--calling on council members to voluntarily reject what was then a proposed increase to set an example of sacrifice for other municipal workers.

At the time, the city was facing a budget crisis so severe that pay increases for city workers were in doubt.

Thirteen of the council’s 15 members took the no-raise pledge. “I cannot imagine that (council members) would take a pay increase at a time when we are asking our own employees to make a sacrifice,” Yaroslavsky said in November.

While campaigning for a seat on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors this spring, Yaroslavsky criticized the board as fiscally irresponsible, citing a secret decision by top county officials to increase the pensions of thousands of county employees. The biggest pension bonanzas went to supervisors and senior bureaucrats.

Tim Lynch, spokesman for City Controller Rick Tuttle, said Yaroslavsky was the only one of the 13 City Council members to change his mind about the refusal.

The 5% council pay increase boosts a council member’s pay from $90,680 to $95,214 per year, a $4,534 increase. Because he will step down from his council job in early December to become a supervisor, Yaroslavsky will get $1,200 for about a quarter of a year.

Still, that raise would have increased by $500 the total annual amount of pension benefits payable to Yaroslavsky, 46, when he is eligible at 55 to receive retirement pay from the city. As a retiree with 19 1/2 years of city service, Yaroslavsky will be entitled to a pension of more than $37,000 a year.

When it was learned that Yaroslavsky intended to take the money after all, his chief deputy, Alisa Katz, said he planned to donate it to four worthy programs in his district, but acknowledged that he would get a pension boost.

The councilman intends to divide the money equally among a project to build a new library in Studio City, the Sherman Oaks senior citizens center, the Beverly-Fairfax Patrol and the Westwood Farmers Market, Katz said.

Yaroslavsky, out of town at a conference in Berlin, noted in the news release that his raise actually amounted to 1.25% for the year, less than the 2% annual increase the city has offered civilian employees.