How would you like to earn a pension while getting your hair cut, playing golf or going to a cocktail party? Sounds sweet? Well, run for public office. Those are some of the presumably vital public activities that Albany County legislators had the gall to list in their time sheets in order to amass enough hours to qualify for pension credits.
Standing out in a pretty shameful crowd was the NY Legislature’s chairman, Shawn Morse, who went so far as to earn two pensions simultaneously, Times Union reporter Brendan Lyons found in a review of time sheets. Mr. Morse booked hours in his part-time county post while he was on duty as a full-time Cohoes firefighter. That’s not allowed by the state pension system, even if he was doing county business during his downtime in a firehouse.
But don’t just single out one lawmaker or one county legislature. This is a problem all across New York at every level of government: politicians feathering their personal nests at taxpayer expense.
The issue isn’t just the rank cheating that goes on as lawmakers stretch the meaning of work in order to qualify for pension credits. The issue is also whether such part-time elected posts should even been treated like government jobs at all.
Elected officials in New York state can qualify for state pensions if they work at their office full time, which in local governments across the state is defined as 30 hours — the minimum allowed — under resolutions passed annually by — you guessed it — the very town and county legislative bodies that benefit from this definition of full-time employment.
The state requires officials to provide, once every eight years, a three-month sample of their time to prove they meet that threshold. And lo and behold, many do — some by plugging in activities that really have no government purpose, and whose main purpose is to keep the politician elected — fundraising, speaking to community groups, or just showing up, which, for better or worse, could easily be the entire job description of some lawmakers.
But what New York’s long-suffering taxpayers need perhaps even more is a re-examination of who qualifies for a state pension and who doesn’t. Perhaps they’re appropriate for full-time mayors and supervisors and highway superintendents, most of whom likely put in a full week, week in and week out. But what justification is there at all for public pensions for part-time legislators — village, town, city, county, and, yes, state. Perhaps state legislators most of all.
It’s state lawmakers, remember, who make the big decisions on the state’s costly retirement system. How can we expect them to take what needs to be a compassionate but hard look at the system and make sensible decisions about it, when lawmakers themselves stand to gain or lose by those very decisions?
We elect people to local, county and state legislative bodies to represent and govern, not to become part of the bureaucracy. Ending pensions for these representatives would be a step toward focusing them more on the public’s interest and less on their own.
http://blog.timesunion.com/opinion/new-yorks-pension-scam/25564/
Thank you the precise and accurate comment Liz.