Losing the initiative

San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed has given up his push for public employee pension reform. For now.
Reed and his allies called it quits Friday after a judge rejected Reed's challenge to the language describing the measure for the purposes of signature collection.
Proponents now have their sights set on the 2016 election cycle, the Democratic mayor said in a statement.

San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed

The continued reliance on the initiative process is bad in that it has overwhelmingly been subverted by moneyed special interests. Not that Reed and his allies are all that moneyed. It is estimated it would take about $2 million to gather the necessary signatures to get his proposal before the voters. He has about $200,000.
What is good about Reed's proposal, though, is that it keeps the issue before the public. Public pensions can't be sustained in their current form, Reed argues. He's correct and everyone acknowledges it save public employee unions who see pension reform not only as a challenge to their members' pocketbooks but also their power.
What Reed proposed was giving government agencies, under certain circumstances, the power to freeze accrued retirement benefits and reduce them in the future. Once promised, some case law says, pension benefits can't be cut without an offsetting benefit.
Of course, one offsetting benefit might be having a pension at all. Many employees in the private sector have seen their defined-benefit pensions frozen, and replaced -- if at all -- by the much more iffy defined-contribution plans such as 401k accounts. That shifts responsibility to employees not always equipped to handle the nuances of volatile equities and bond markets.
Simply throwing the current defined-benefit system out is unlikely. Modifying the current system, however, is not only likely, but necessary. The unsustainability of the current system is without question. Unfunded pension liabilities are strangling government budgets. One of the major factors underlying Stockton's bankruptcy filing was the reality that the California city faced employee pension obligations it could not meet.
However, pension reform should come through legislation, not the ballot box. Too often reform proposals passed through the initiative process  are too simplistic to work and too unfair to those involved. Reform should be a transparent, well-thought-out process.
Reed's proposal isn't. His insistence on reform is.