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Retired California public employees are flocking to Idaho with their pension funds and becoming the financial "lifeblood" of at least one Idaho town, ruffling feathers with some locals who are taking issue with the "liberal baggage" of the new residents.
The Los Angeles Times reported this month the town of Eagle, Idaho, has seen an influx of retired cops and firefighters moving to their town with many of them identifying as conservative but who "seem practically socialist to the old guard" with their large pensions.
Two California transplants squared off in the most recent mayoral race, and the key issue between the two former Golden State residents was "who was the least Californian."
Former Eagle, Idaho, Mayor Jason Pierce arrived in Idaho more than 20 years ago with no public pension and lost an election to a more recent arrival with a six-figure California fire captain's pension. Pierce told the outlet it was "ludicrous" the new residents call themselves Republicans.
Hundreds of Trump supporters gather at the Idaho Statehouse in Boise, Idaho, November 7, 2020, following the announcement that Joe Biden had won the U.S. presidential election. (Darin Oswald/Idaho Statesman/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
"You find a lot of Californians who move here don’t realize how much [liberal] baggage they’re bringing with them," Pierce said.
Pierce said he doesn’t understand how Californians with pensions that exceed what working people make in Idaho can move to the state and call themselves conservative.
"They want to give the same kind of benefits to officers and state employees here," Pierce told the outlet. "And it’s like, ‘Wait a minute, you literally created a huge deficit in California, and now you want to do the same thing here?’"
Fox News Digital spoke to Pierce this week, and he said "there's a bigger story happening in communities like ours."
"Californians have been programmed in a way that they think they're conservative, but then they move to a place like Eagle, Idaho, and they start asking for the same things that the government was providing them in California," Pierce said.
"Honestly, they don't even realize what they're doing, but you have to kind of go, ‘Wait a minute, so you want your taxes to go up?' Oh, I'd be willing to pay a little bit more, and it's like, wait a minute, you just left all this."
Pierce explained that when the new residents from California see trash on the street they wonder why more isn’t done to clean it up, something he takes issue with.
"So, you want your taxes to go up," Pierce said he tells the new residents. "You want more government?"
Voting booths on Election Day (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic, File)
Brad Pike, the mayor-elect of Eagle who won a December 6 runoff election by 10 points, moved to Idaho with a $123,000 pension and said he’s been a Republican for 41 years and could finally "exhale" when he moved to Idaho and "relax and enjoy life."
"This is a free country. You have the option to go anywhere you want," Pike told the outlet. "I’m not ashamed to say that I brought my CalPERS pension to Idaho.
"I came here looking for anything that’s not the liberal, socialistic view of the government in California."
Pierce told Fox News Digital there is a schism between what qualifies as a Republican in California and what locals in Idaho view as conservative when it comes to taxes, gun rights and other issues.
"We take care of ourselves," Pierce told Fox News Digital about Idaho. "We take care of our neighbors, and you're getting a lot more people wanting, you know, others to take care of them. It's odd."
Pierce added that about 60% of the people who move to Idaho don't take the time to get to know the local population and what makes a town special, like he did when he moved to the state from California in 2003.
A "Welcome to Idaho" sign (Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
"I immediately got involved because I want to find out what made this place special, because I didn't want to bring my mentality of 16 years of living in Southern California," Pierce said. "So, I started going to council meetings. I started getting involved, and I got on commissions, and I got on boards, and I did all these things and go, ‘OK, I see why these are special.’
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"Now you're getting these folks that have moved here, and they've got 15, 16 years of entrenched California in them, and they think they know what was right and what was wrong. But they haven't put the time and effort into really getting involved in the community to find out what made it and why they came here."
The Los Angeles Times reported nearly 90,000 members of California’s main public employee retirement system receive their pension payments outside the state, and exiles have collected more than $3.6 billion in state pensions.
The zip code receiving the most pension money outside California, according to the Los Angeles Times, was Eagle, Idaho.
California saw its first-ever population decline in 2020 when the state imposed rigid lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic. From January 2020 to July 2022, the state lost well over half a million people, with the number of residents leaving surpassing those moving in by almost 700,000.
MyEListing.com, an online real estate portal, studied IRS migration data and found that California lost more than $340 million in 2021 IRS tax revenue due to residents moving.
Pierce explained he is concerned the California values being imported into the state will have a negative effect, similar to the documentary "Rocky Mountain Heist," which focused on how Colorado went from a red state to a blue state.
"I don't think it gets done on purpose by the conservatives or the Republicans," Pierce said. "I think what they get is bamboozled into the Democrat talking points, and they're very easily able to promote their ideas without them sounding liberal."
A former Los Angeles Police Department sergeant who recently retired and moved to the Eagle area, told the Los Angeles Times "70% to 80% of us would still be in California" if it weren't for the elected officials driving them from the state.
Fox News Digital's Nikolas Lanum contributed to this report.
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