Armando Ruiz' appalling legacy

     One of the minor characters in the epic “SOCCCD and the Neanderthals” saga is Armando "Beyondo" Ruiz, who, while counseling at Saddleback College, managed to get elected on the Coast Community College District board of trustees. That started back in the 80s, I believe.
     Ruiz is coarse, stupid, spectacularly incorrect (around women), and dishonest. Naturally, therefore, about a dozen years ago, in his desperation to gain allies, then-IVC President Raghu Mathur cut a deal with Ruiz; he had "Boots" transferred from Saddleback College to Irvine Valley College for the purpose of grooming him for an administrative career, despite Boot Boy's manifest shititude.
     Not a problem.
     Soon, Ruiz was indeed an IVC administrator, eventually achieving his Mathur-contrived apex as the Vice President of Student Services. Besides Mathur, he was the least popular person at the college.
     That Ruiz was a creep wasn’t a problem for Mathur--after all, Mathur’s creepitude at least matches Ruiz’. That he kept f*cking up was slightly more bothersome. But the worst thing about Ruiz was his manifest disgruntlement, in 2002, when he wasn’t chosen to replace Mathur, who, natch, was awarded the district Chancellorship right after having sued the district. (He sued the district for not having protected him from my suing him in response to his suing me for reporting the truth about him—namely, that he had once violated a federal law protecting students' privacy rights.)
     So, after that, Ruiz bailed, i.e., he retired.
     That’s when he performed the sleazy maneuver upon which his wider infamy rests. Exploiting a loophole in the law, he resigned his trusteeship just days before getting reelected; he thus contrived to enjoy an enormous pension. (As Frank Mickadeit once explained: “He was taking advantage of a loophole that allows a person who exits two state jobs on the same day to count the highest-paying of the two as the salary for both jobs for the purpose of calculating his pension. …So, Ruiz "retired" ... as a part-time trustee of the Coast district and as a full-time counselor at Irvine Valley College. Even though the trustee gig pays just a $9,800 annual stipend, he was able to calculate his state pension as if he had been paid $106K a year for that "job'" plus the $106K a year he got for his real job at Irvine.")
     It was a spectacular flimflam, proving once again that stupidity and craftiness easily fit inside the Neanderthal’s ample cranium.
     A local journalist took up the cause of getting rid of the odious Ruiz. Eventually, Ruiz lost reelection in 2008.
     But he can be proud. Evidently, he has set an example for other Coast trustees! Check it out:

Community college trustee finds pension loophole (OC Reg)

     Coast Community College Trustee Walter Howald has been boosting his future take from the state’s beleaguered public pension fund in a way that most elected officials can’t.
     In the mid-1990s the legislature passed a law saying service as an elected official doesn’t count as service credit in the public employee retirement system.
     CalPERS calculates pensions using two main factors, salary and years of service. Howald previously held administrative positions at Kern County Colleges and College of the Desert; he left the latter in 2008.
     Normally that would mean he would stop accruing service credits in PERS, but because he began serving on the board in 1985, before the passage of the law, he was grandfathered in.
     The Watchdog got wind of this late last month and filed a public records request with the district. The records … verify that Howald has remained enrolled in PERS in his capacity as an elected official.
     But as Howald cheerfully pointed out when The Watchdog chatted with him, this is all legal.
     Still, the loophole and our public records request has spurred the president of the board, Jerry Patterson, to action. He will be proposing a policy at this week’s meeting to eliminate the loophole. His regulation would mandate that a trustee whose salary generates service credit under PERS would be ineligible to be paid by the district.
    That, Patterson says, would solve the problem: A person who receives no salary is not eligible for service credit under PERS.
     This is not the first time the district has confronted retirement payout issues. Former trustee Armando Ruiz retired just days before his 2004 re-election, setting himself up to collect both salary and a pension pay-out. Ruiz lost the 2008 election; criticism of his double-dipping contributed to that ousting….

See also: The sad Armando Ruiz saga (Frank Mickadeit, OC Reg)