CalPERS Announces Candidate Forum for 2019 Board Election

Two Retired Member Candidates to Speak

SACRAMENTO, Calif. – CalPERS members are invited to attend the CalPERS Board of Administration Candidate Forum on Tuesday, September 10.

The forum will be moderated by the League of Women Voters, and will be held in the CalPERS Auditorium, 400 P Street, Sacramento, from 1:00 to 2:00 p.m. For those who can’t attend in person, the forum will be streamed live on our website, where it will also be posted for later viewing.

Ballots will be mailed August 30 and votes must be received by September 30. Only eligible retired members will be able to vote, using one of three convenient voting methods: Online, by phone, or by mail.

The candidates for the retired member position invited to speak at the forum are:

  • Henry Jones, Incumbent
  • Joseph “JJ” Jelincic, Retired investment officer

The newly elected board member will begin his term January 16, 2020.

The 13-member CalPERS Board of Administration sets policy for retirement and health benefits on behalf of California public employers, and their active and retired employees. The board also oversees asset allocation of the pension fund’s investments. Under the California Constitution, the CalPERS Board has exclusive authority to administer the CalPERS Pension Fund.

Information on the upcoming board election and resources for members is available on our Board Elections page.

About CalPERS

For more than eight decades, CalPERS has built retirement and health security for state, school, and public agency members who invest their lifework in public service. Our pension fund serves more than 1.9 million members in the CalPERS retirement system and administers benefits for more than 1.5 million members and their families in our health program, making us the largest defined-benefit public pension in the U.S. CalPERS’ total fund market value currently stands at approximately $376 billion. For more information, visit www.calpers.ca.gov.

Local 2620 Launches Conservative Caucus to Bring Focus to ‘Lunchbox Issues’

Looking to bring a different perspective to the table when it comes to fighting for issues affecting working people, several members of AFSCME Local 2620 recently formed a Conservative Caucus to make sure the conservative voice was included in the local’s work throughout California.

Launching the caucus is a bold move in our state, which is heavily progressive in state and national politics.

But members felt this was long overdue, especially since the local has members in every county of the state and not all of them lean left in their political views.

A big part of forming the group was to remind our union that it “has a responsibility to equally represent its members,” said VeRonica Mundell, a licensed clinical social worker and steward who is chair of the local’s Conservative Caucus.

The caucus held its first meeting in Burbank and brought a number of people together to set their agenda and expand the tent as wide as possible.

Guests included Erin Cruz, a U.S. Congressional candidate, members from the conservative caucuses of AFSCME Council 28 (Washington) and AFSCME Council 75 (Oregon), members from AFSCME Local 10 and members from AFSCME Council 36 in Southern California.

Moving forward, members of Local 2620’s Conservative Caucus agreed that it was important to have a place in our union where the conservative voice can be heard. Most importantly, our sisters and brothers pledged to take a more active role in our union’s political process by supporting candidates that support “lunch box issues,” which include fair pay, a secure retirement, healthcare benefits, preventing outsourcing and a state budget that values working people.

Watch the video to get highlights from the first Conservative Caucus meeting.

Offering Comfort Amidst the Cinders

For most of the country, Nov. 8, 2018, might not stand out the same way it does for social worker Lance Ferris. But for Ferris, who’s based in Chico, that was a day that changed his life and the lives of those in his community forever.

On that day, the worst and most destructive wildfire in California’s history, the Camp Fire, destroyed parts of Chico, nearly all of its neighboring town to the east, Paradise, as well as large swatches of Butte County. It was a day marked by extraordinary devastation and extraordinary, enduring acts of empathy by people like Ferris, a winner of a Never Quit Service Award.

For the past 13 years, Ferris, a member and steward of AFSCME Local 2620, has been the only social worker in an outpatient clinic whose goal is to help parolees leaving the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation transition back into society. It’s a job that requires skill, focus and a deep well of empathy every day. And as the only clinical person in his office, it’s a role that can be isolating.

“I work on behalf of folks who have been incarcerated who are reintegrating into the community,” says Ferris. “(Their crimes) could be anything that’s low level, or even lifers who are getting out of prison. I provide individual and group therapy and case management services.”

No matter who his clients are or what their crimes might have been, Ferris approaches each with the same professionalism and clinical poise.

“How I feel about their offense is off the table when I’m working,” says the Brooklyn native. “I’ve always been able to create a space for people to have real therapy. That’s been the core of the work I do. That’s my training, who I am, and what I’m committed to. I work very hard at it.”

Ferris has been involved in his community for many years, counseling patients in a private practice he runs in addition to his job at the Department of Corrections and facilitating yoga and cycling classes as well. Despite being a college town, this semi-rural region of Northern California lacks for many of the resources you’d see in larger cities. It’s a place where residents, many of whom are retirees, prize their independence and can live a life off the grid.

But when the Camp Fire ripped through his community, leaving almost 90 people dead, destroying tens of thousands of structures and leaving tens of thousands more homeless, the trauma that permeated the area’s residents meant they needed to come together quickly.

“We’ve never seen anything like this,” says Ferris. “I’ve never seen this level of trauma.”

It was a community full of neighbors who’d lost loved ones or whose loved ones were missing; people whose homes and lives had been destroyed; a community wiped out; and first responders grappling with doing their jobs yet stunned by the horrors they’d seen.

Faced with an unprecedented crisis, Ferris did what he knew how to do best: he counseled people.

“I made myself available to do trauma work,” said Ferris, who was uniquely qualified to address many of the crises his fellow residents and first responders were experiencing. “I do a very special intervention called ‘Brainspotting.’ It has a great efficacy in reducing primary and second trauma with survivors of natural disasters.”

In the days, weeks and months to come after the fire, Ferris found himself holding counseling sessions for community members in need at his office or elsewhere throughout the town. Whether it was someone who’d become homeless after the fire, or someone who’d lost a pet, Ferris used his broad set of clinical skills to try to comfort the person sitting across from him.

“Suddenly, you saw folks who’d wanted to live a quiet life off the grid needing help,” he said.

Ferris said that the gyms where he taught yoga were now filled with people who’d come down from Paradise with nowhere else to go. While the trauma his clients faced after the fire differed from the parolees he counseled, the attention he paid to them and his rigorous approach to their therapy remained the same.

“If you take a look a trauma, there was the initial impact of the fire, but now they are rebuilding their lives. People are being triggered off the wall. It’s big,” said Ferris.

In nominating Ferris for the Never Quit Award, fellow Local 2620 member Deanna Stilwell wrote that Ferris’ job is challenging as it is. After the Camp Fire, “Lance immediately went into high gear, where he continues to give extraordinary care on a daily basis to a vulnerable population whose lives were turned upside down in seconds,” Stilwell wrote.

Nine months later, life still isn’t back to normal in the region. Much of the area in Butte County that the fire had torn through is still in ruins. While the rest of the country has moved on, Ferris and his neighbors haven’t. He’s returned to work now, resumed his life, but there are no pat endings to his community’s story.

“The aftermath was frightening for months. The impact has been huge,” said Ferris. “Where do you land? I still don’t have the answer.”