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The New York State Retirement System bases one's pension on the top three years' salary. They have to be consecutive years, which probably means this guy worked a lot of overtime during the last years of his career. Was he actually on the job all those hours? Who knows. He was in Tier I, and with 45 years in the system, he didn't have to donate one penny toward his pension. Tier I pensioners are few and far between these days.

I started out in Tier I back in '65, then left the system in '71 to stay home with my second child. We moved to a different part of the State, and when I did finally go back to work for the County I was then living in, I ended up in Tier 3 because I'd been out of the retirement system for more than 5 years. I had to donate 3% of my salary every two weeks to the system for the next 20+ years. I also bought back the previous time I had from '65 to '71. That time would be added on to the number of years I'd worked for the State at my retirement. Around 2000, Carl McCall who had been State Comptroller, introduced a Bill to the State Legislature that provided the opportunity for people who had previously been in Tier I, and had had an interruption in their State service due to specific qualifying circumstances, to apply to be re-instated into Tier I. I applied, and was re-instated, and for the last year and a half of my career, I didn't have to pay into the retirement system. They did however keep the 20+ years of donations I had previously paid into it, which I had no problem with. When I retired, I had approximately 33 years of service. I've been retired almost 15 years, and between my pension and my social security, I'm making almost what I was making while I was working.