Special fund on Santa Clara County property tax bill pays for employee pensions

The San Jose Mercury News reports:

A San Jose cop could retire after 30 years on the force with a pension worth 90 percent of his salary.

With pension reform on the city's June ballot, police are looking at having to pay a lot more for that pension -- or being forced into a cheaper plan.

A deputy sheriff with Santa Clara County also has a pension that would pay 90 percent of his salary when he reaches 30 years. But the county isn't facing a public revolt over pension reform.

One of the reasons? Since 1945, Santa Clara County is the only county in California where taxpayers have been subsidizing those retirements through a special fund that appears on your property tax bill. That fund also helps pay retirement costs for the county's other 14,550 employees.

The tax in the upper right hand corner of the county property tax bill is listed simply as "Co Retirement Levy," and has been capped for about 30 years at .000388 cents per $100 of assessed property valuation. A homeowner with a home assessed at $500,000, for example, would pay $194 to the special retirement tax annually, said Santa Clara County Chief Operating Officer Gary Graves.

But that's in addition to the overall property tax revenue that already helps pay for county pensions.

Your high taxes are "their" generous pensions.