Assembly Upholds Wilson’s Veto of Survivors’ Benefits Bill

Supporting Gov. Pete Wilson, the Assembly on Tuesday upheld his veto of a bill that would have allowed surviving spouses of most local public employees, including police officers killed in the line of duty, to keep collecting death benefits if they remarry.

Despite emotional testimony and the presence of more than half a dozen widows of slain peace officers, an evenly divided Assembly voted 38 to 38 to override Wilson’s veto of the so-called Fairness for Families bill. Fifty-four votes are required to override a veto.

The measure (AB 399) earned bipartisan support in the Assembly last year, sailing through with 60 votes. But when the bill came back for reconsideration Tuesday, GOP lawmakers almost unanimously chose to stand by the Republican governor’s October veto. Wilson said Tuesday that he vetoed the bill because it included a broad range of public employees, such as librarians, whose pensions should be left to negotiations at the local level.

Democrats blasted the remarriage penalty, noting that it was eliminated for state and federal workers years ago. They also suggested that Assembly Republicans were abandoning their much-ballyhooed support of family values by rejecting a measure meant to help widowed women and their children.

“If you’re for fairness, if you’re for the families, you ought to support this bill,” said Assemblyman Sal Cannella (D-Ceres), the measure’s author.

Cannella said the penalty is particularly onerous for the spouses of high-risk local government employees such as police officers. “If they happen to die on duty and not retire, it’s a windfall for the agency,” he said, because cities get to keep 100% of an employee’s pension if a spouse vows not to remarry but does.

The most emotional words came from Assemblywoman Jackie Speier, a Burlingame Democrat who has raised two children alone since the 1994 death of her husband in an automobile accident.

Speier talked of the “sense of loss you feel every single day, the absolute sense of knowing that everything, absolutely everything, is on your shoulders.”

Several Republicans, however, suggested that they had been misled when the bill first moved through the house.

Assemblyman Larry Bowler (R-Elk Grove) said police unions had mischaracterized the bill as applying only to the families of peace officers, when in fact its reach would be much broader. He said other advocates, chief among them Traditional Values Coalition leader Lou Sheldon, had gone along with that deception.

Republicans said they planned to begin pushing a measure that would narrow the focus to just the families of police killed on duty.