Brothers and Sisters,

 I hope this message finds you all doing well. By now everyone should have received a communication from the Bay Area painters and tapers pension and annuity trust fund regarding changes to the plan. What does this mean for you? One of the changes that the pension plan trustees approved was for any members who have 25 years of service under the plan. As long as you have not retired and have 25 good years under the plan your pension benefit will go from 1% of contributions to 1.33% of contributions. The second change is based on industry training. Currently a large portion of our pension contributions are going to the pension deficit, the remaining amount is what is going towards your actual benefit accruals. As long as you get 16 hours of training from July 1st to June 30th each year, you will get an added dollar from the off-benefit portion towards your benefit accruals. Although it may not seem like much these amounts are going to make a huge impact on all of our pensions. If you have any questions or would like any clarification of any of this please contact me directly at 916-696-1106. 

I am also pleased to announce that we will be holding informational meetings for members that live in the Stanislaus and Merced County area. Our first meeting is scheduled for June 3rd, 2024, at 5:00 PM. The meeting will be held at the Modesto junior college at the Mary Stuart Rogers Center. We want to hear from all the members and understand that it is hard for the members that live down there to come to meetings in Sacramento or even in the Bay Area. We are hoping to have these scheduled quarterly or bimonthly depending on how much participation we get. Please try to show up if you live in these areas. We really want to get you the information we provide at the monthly meetings and also want to hear from you. Please keep in mind that these meetings will be strictly informational. 

In Solidarity,

William Gonzalez