An observant reader alerts us to Frank Mickadeit’s latest column. It concerns a fellow handpicked years ago by Raghu to join team Mathur!
King of the platinum parachute: Double-dipper Ruiz is back (10/13/08)
Frank Mickadeit
Three weeks from today, if history holds to form, a plurality of ill-informed voters in Area 3 of the Coast Community College District will re-elect Armando Ruiz to another four-year term.
I say uninformed because I do not believe most of the voters to be unintelligent – they are simply too busy to really pay attention to what they perceive as a relatively minor race. Were they informed, they would know Ruiz is a scoundrel of the most cynical ilk, a career bureaucrat and politician who systematically milks the system and, I presume, will continue to do so until he is too feeble of mind or body to put his signature to the re-election documents that election after election propel him back into office.
Ruiz first came to my attention during his last election, in 2004. In a series of deft moves, he created for himself a golden – nay, a platinum – parachute that would shame a bond-company CEO.
To paraphrase heavily from one of my own brilliant summations of this complex set of maneuvers, here's how he did it:
In early 2004, Ruiz was an administrator in the South County Community College District. He also was a trustee of the Coast district; his term was up in November.
He wanted to officially "retire" from both jobs on the same day so he could take advantage of a loophole that allowed a person to pull the ultimate pension spike. He also wanted to run again for the Coast board, but if he "retired" from that part-time gig and ran again, he couldn't be listed as an incumbent on the ballot and would risk losing.
Here's how he accomplished both goals: Early in the year, he set his South County retirement for Oct. 31, the Sunday before the Nov. 2 election. Then on Friday, Oct. 29, at 4:32 p.m. – 28 minutes before the county education office closed and he would lose his opportunity – he faxed over a four-sentence letter in which he also retired from the Coast trusteeship, also effective Oct. 31.
This triggered a bizarre law that, until it was changed, allowed a person who left two state jobs on the same day to claim the higher of the two salaries and calculate both salaries for his pension. Ruiz's pension was treated as if he had made $106,000 a year at his real job at the South County district (which he did) and $106,000 a year at the Coast district (which he didn't), for a "salary" of $212,000.
In reality, the Coast trusteeship paid an annual stipend of about $10,000, so the most he ever really made was about $116,000 a year. The difference is that Ruiz will get about $108,000 a year for life instead of the $59,000 a year he should have.
And because he waited until the Friday before the election to resign from the board, he remained on the ballot as an incumbent. He won with 41 percent of the vote, two challengers splitting the rest.
When this was discovered, some citizens started a recall. The range of public figures calling for him to simply quit was impressively broad – from the faculty union to charity leader Jean Forbath to conservative then-Treasurer John Moorlach. A member of his own board – former Democratic Congressman Jerry Patterson – helped lead the charge.
But the effort lost momentum and then failed. Ruiz knew he could probably wait it out. So he has spent the past four years: collecting his inflated pension; traveling around the U.S. on the taxpayer's dime; taking campaign contributions from people who do business with the district; and, notably, delaying making public a serious accreditation issue that faces the district he claims to have led so well as its most recent chairman.
I will discuss these issues in Wednesday's column. As in the past, I put a call into Ruiz. He had not called me back as of deadline Monday. I don't hold out much hope he will call today. He has never returned one of my calls and he hung up on education reporter Marla Fisher when she last tried to talk to him about the pension spiking. Nonetheless, I will give him until this afternoon – until 4:32, to be precise.
