On Monday, August 27, 2012, Lansing City Council held a public hearing on a proposed new Police and Fire Retirement System ordinance and then voted unanimously to pass it. Before the vote, I offered the following "public comment":

The new Police and Fire Retirement System ordinance contains a couple of items that will increase the City's pension costs.

One is the multiplier. The pension is calculated by multiplying years of service times final average compensation times a multiplier.  In the old ordinance, the multiplier was 3.2% for police with the rank of sergeant or above and 2.95% for everybody else. Now everybody gets the 3.2% multiplier.

The other is the minimum age for retirement. It used to be 50. In the new ordinance, there is no minimum. Police and firefighters can retire at any age as long as they have 25 years of service. They are going to be retiring earlier and receiving pensions longer.

Actually, they are already retiring as young as age 46. That's because these provisions have already been in effect for 2.5 years. They were established in the collective bargaining process. This new ordinance is just a formality. A public hearing is an exercise in futility, because any modification to the proposed ordinance that differs from the union contract could be considered an unfair labor practice.

I feel sorry for anyone who has relied on the current ordinance for understanding the Police and Fire Retirement System in the last 2.5 years. It is fiction.

Collective bargaining for public employees subverts the democratic process. It has a huge impact on taxes, yet allows no public participation. Negotiations occur behind closed doors. Not even our elected representatives - you council members - are allowed to participate.

Collective bargaining for local governments is required by state law, so what happened here it is beyond the control of this council. That should not keep you from making it clear that a public hearing on this ordinance is a waste of time, a farce.  The ordinance is a done deal and what the public thinks about it doesn't matter.

Thank you.