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 remarried.

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

The measure 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.

In an open letter Tuesday to a peace officers group, Wilson said the law would have saddled local governments with expensive benefit payments for spouses of employees who were not law enforcement officers.

Wilson said he supports revoking the “remarriage penalty” for spouses of slain officers but not for “a vast array of other local employees such as mosquito abatement, water district and library employees,” his letter said.

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

Assemblyman Larry Bowler (R-Elk Grove) said supporters had mischaracterized the bill as applying only to the families of peace officers. He said other advocates, chief among them the Rev. Lou Sheldon, leader of the Anaheim-based Traditional Values Coalition, had gone along with that deception.

“I say ‘shame on you’ . . . for manipulating these widows and children for your own political games,” Bowler said. “Shame on you, Lou Sheldon, for joining in this conspiracy.”

But Democrats, who blasted the remarriage penalty, noted that it was eliminated for state, school and federal workers years ago. They also suggested that Assembly Republicans were abandoning their much-ballyhooed support of family values by rejecting a bill 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. “The only thing these families are guilty of is having [a loved one] die on the job.”

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 can keep 100% of an employee’s pension if a spouse vows not to remarry but later does.

Spouses of local employees whose pensions are handled by the California Public Employees Retirement System are also penalized if they say they will remarry. They take a 25% hit to the deceased mate’s pension, money that goes back to city coffers.

“That’s wrong. You know it’s wrong,” said Cannella.

CalPERS had backed the legislation and the override.

Assemblyman Phillip Isenberg (D-Sacramento) said the sudden change of heart by Republicans amounted to “politics, pure and simple.” He noted that the Legislature has not overridden a governor’s veto since the days of Gov. Edmund G. “Jerry” Brown Jr.

“I cannot understand why you would not override a veto when Pete Wilson is, in this case, just dead-bang wrong,” Isenberg said.

The most emotional plea 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.”

Saying that one of her own children periodically asks when a new father will arrive, Speier said current law “creates a penalty if these women have the audacity to remarry.”

Joan Swearingen, whose husband, Los Alamitos Police Lt. Duane Swearingen, died two years ago from injuries suffered in a fight with a suspect, said she was disappointed but not surprised by Tuesday’s vote. Swearingen has been working to abolish the remarriage penalty since her husband died in 1993.

While Swearingen said she would support legislation that addresses only spouses of police officers and firefighters, that limitation makes little sense, she said, when the penalty has already been abolished for so many others--including the governor and his staff.

“Who gave him the power?” she said of Wilson. “That’s discrimination at its very best. If they just pass it for us, it’s going to be discriminatory for others. Where do you draw the line?”

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

“I understand how difficult it is to vote against widows and orphans of slain peace officers,” said Assemblyman Jim Brulte (R-Rancho Cucamonga). But he said that fewer than 1% of the cases that would fall under the measure involved the families of police officers and suggested that the measure would create a $33-million “unfunded mandate” for local government agencies around the state. Cannella disputed that argument.

Brulte said that 425 cities, 36 counties and 773 other agencies would lose money if the remarriage penalty were revoked. Among the agencies, he said, are mosquito abatement, library and cemetery districts.

“That’s why the governor was right to veto the bill,” Brulte said. Giving other local government employees “the same status as a peace officer killed in the line of duty is just plain wrong,” he said.