The City of Lansing’s pension system is way too costly and is causing us to lose our most experienced police and firemen. When they can get a generous pension after only 25 years and then supplement it with income from another job, they have a huge incentive to leave as soon as those 25 years are up - or sooner, since they can purchase up to 5 years of service. Take for example Mark Ally, former Chief of Police. He retired in March of 2010 at age 48. He had only 24 years and one month of service, so he purchased another 11 months at a cost of $107,812. He retired to take a job as senior director of risk management for Emergent BioSolutions Inc. I don’t know how much he is paid there, but they apparently made him an offer he couldn’t refuse – especially when he knew that his new salary would be supplemented by a $90,356 a year pension from the City.
"This is a bittersweet moment for me," Alley said in a
statement, "because I love my job and the people I work with. At
the same time, this is a wonderful opportunity for (my wife)
Cassie and me to start writing a new chapter in our lives.". . . In effect, Lansing’s pension system pays employees to work elsewhere – not a prudent use of the Lansing taxpayer’s money. Besides losing experienced police and firemen, a system that handsomely rewards them for getting out early might tend to attract people who are in it for the money rather than love of the work, or a desire to serve and protect. “Dedicated to the job” is a phrase often associated with public safety workers, but it doesn’t seem to fit employees who take the money and run before age 50. If the rationale is that public safety workers are worn out and ineffective after 25 years, it still makes no sense to give them pensions big enough to support them for the rest of their lives. Even if they are no longer physically up to the strain of public safety jobs, they should not expect to quit working altogether. They should get another job and work until age 65, like regular folks, rather than expect Lansing taxpayers to support them and their families while they do nothing. Being ineffective after 25 years on the job doesn’t seem be the reason, however. Mandatory retirement age is 60 for police and 70 for firefighters. The ability to do the job and do it well shouldn’t be based on age. With the proper physical conditioning, workers should have the strength and stamina to be effective well past age 60. Nor does being under 50 guarantee that they are physically fit. Fitness should be determined by periodic assessments, not assumptions based on age. Few of the City’s public safety workers stay beyond 25 years. Of the firefighters on the payroll in 2010, I found only 5. One was Fire Chief William T. Cochran, who has been on the job 29 years and 3 months. Of the other 4, one was 10 months past 25 years as of the end of 2010, the other three were 4 months past. Of the police, I found only one, Sergeant Frank Koenigsknecht. He retired in June of 2010 after 31 years and 3 months on the job. Of 19 police and firefighters who retired in 2011, only 2 had more than 25 years, and of the other 17, 10 purchased service. The life expectancy of a male who reaches age 50 is 81.6, which means that if he retires at 50 after 25 years of service, he will receive a pension for 31.6 years - longer than he worked. I calculated life expectancy at age 50 at this site, using 12/1/1961 for birth date. There is no way to tell, but my suspicion is that few, if any, stop working altogether when they retire from the City. Their pensions range from $55-70,000, which is pretty good with no deduction for FICA or city income tax, but another salary could easily bring the total to over $100,000 a year. The likelihood that most police and firefighters go on to other jobs is indicated by the fact that about half of them don’t wait until their 25 years is up. Like Mark Alley, they purchase a month or 2 or more of service, paying around $7000 per month, and I don’t think they’d do that unless they had another job to go to. Pension details for some recent retirees are here. For the retirees we looked at, police pensions averaged 93.9% of salary and fire pensions averaged 92.6% of salary. The salaries and pensions received by public service workers make them a luxury we can't afford. That is part of the reason our police force has shrunk from 244 at the end of 2009 to about 187 at the end of August 2011, and our firefighter total has shrunk from 214 to about 179 in the same period. (The 2009 figures come from pages B-14-15 of the actuarial valuation; 34 police and 11 firefighters were laid off in June 2011; and 23 police and 24 firefighters retired in 2010 and 2011.) This is from a 12/19/11 article in the Washington Post about the International Association of Firefighters union (IAFF):
See 11/21/11 article by Angela Wittrock of mlive.com. |