More inflated state pensions

Two more ex-members of the Connecticut General Assembly, who served many years for low legislative pay, now have begun collecting healthy state pensions by virtue of being appointed to high-level, end-of-career jobs in 2011 during the recent administration of their fellow Democrat, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.

Longtime state Reps. Melody Currey and Michael Lawlor — who served 12 and 24 years, respectively, in the state House for annual pay that barely topped $40,000 — have become the latest legislators to be able to use those lean years as lucrative multipliers in the state’s pension formula.

Pensions are calculated by multiplying years of state service times a percentage of an employee’s three-year high salary average — which by the end of Malloy’s administration was $178,853 for Currey and $155,934 for Lawlor, state records show.

The result is that Lawlor, 62, is now collecting a pension of $74,182 a year, and Currey, 68, is receiving $69,225.

Those totals are much better than if Lawlor’s 34 years of state service, and Currey’s 28 years, had been multiplied against a percentage of the paltry threeyear average of their highest legislative pay, which was around $40,000.

In this column, an ex-legislator’s pension-building years in high-paying, politically appointed jobs have come to be called the “magic years.”

Currey and Lawlor are the newest graduates of this system — which was created by the General Assembly and benefits lucky legislators who get rewarded with big political jobs upon leaving the state House or Senate — and it’s already clear that they won’t be the last.

For them, the magic years ran from 2011 to January 2019. Currey spent the years as Malloy’s commissioner of two executive branch agencies, first the Department Motor Vehicles and then the Department of Administrative Services. Lawlor served as undersecretary for criminal justice policy and planning at the Office of Policy and Management, which is the governor’s budget office.

With the advent of 2019 and the end of Malloy’s tenure, Lawlor retired in January, and Currey in March, to immediately begin receiving monthly pension payments. They’ll get annual cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) of at least 2%, the same as all state pensioners, and are entitled to the state’s generous lifetime retirement health care benefits. Lawlor, an attorney who spent more than a year as a state prosecutor before being elected to the legislature, also holds a tenured associate professor position at the private University of New Haven, teaching criminal justice.

Currey and Lawlor now have joined other prominent ex-legislators who similarly benefited from their own magic years, including:

■ Donald DeFronzo, a former Democratic state senator from New Britain who retired in 2015 after serving four years as Malloy’s first-term DAS commissioner at a $159,000 annual salary. Before being named commissioner in 2011, DeFronzo was collecting a $22,000 annual pension after his 2005 retirement from more than 20 years of lower-paid state service. He came out of retirement in 2011 to accept the commissioner’s job, and after his second retirement, his pension was recalculated at $63,000 in 2015. Now, after four years of COLAs, it’s just over $68,000.

■ Former state Sen. Kevin B. Sullivan, D-West Hartford, who served as Malloy’s $170,000-a-year state revenue services commissioner from 2011 to mid-2018 and then retired to collect a pension that now stands at just more than $75,000. Sullivan’s experience illustrates the pension-boosting power of his seven magic years as a highpaid commissioner. Before Malloy appointed him to the big job in 2011, Sullivan, a former Senate President Pro Tempore, had already retired with state service of 17 ½ years as a legislator and 2 ½ years as lieutenant governor — and, based on that, was receiving only $16,000 a year as a pension. Now he’s getting more than 4 ½ times that.

As mentioned above, it’s the legislators who make the pension laws that they benefit from and the calculation of Currey’s pension provides a good example of that. Her total of 28 years of state service credit included the five years and a month she served as mayor of East Hartford from December 2005 to January 2011.

When you’re mayor of East Hartford, you’re a municipal employee, not a state employee, so how does that count as state service toward a Connecticut pension? Well, it turns out that state legislators took care of that, and took care of themselves, when they passed a law in 1990 that says: “Any member of Tier II of the state employees’ retirement system” — which Currey was — “[who is] elected to serve as an official of the state or any political subdivision of the state … may elect, during the time he so serves, but no longer than ten years, to continue his membership in said system.”

That’s what Currey did. “Ms. Currey elected to continue her Tier II membership during her time as Mayor,” a spokesperson for the state’s retirement system said in an email Thursday. “As such, her time as Mayor was treated as though it was continued state service.”

Other ex-General Assembly members who served multiple legislative terms now are in line for enhanced pension benefits someday because they’re serving in politically appointed state jobs that pay far more than their onetime legislative salaries.

They include:

■ Longtime state Sen. Tim Larson, D-East Hartford, who in January accepted new Gov. Ned Lamont’s appointment as the $146,500-a-year executive director of the state’s Office of Higher Education rather than be sworn in to the Senate seat to which he’d won reelection last November. Larson is a former East Hartford mayor and the brother of U.S. Rep. John Larson, D-1st District.

■ Former Sen. Beth Bye, D-West Hartford, who also decided against being sworn in for a new term last January when Lamont named her to lead the state’s Office of Early Childhood for $155,000 a year.

■ Former Sen. Terry Gerratana, D-New Britain, who left the Senate in January when Lamont made her a $90,000-a-year adviser at the state’s Office of Health Care Strategy. Special elections had to be held to fill her Senate vacancy and those of Larson and Bye.

■ Former 20-year Rep. Chris Caruso, DBridgeport, who was given an executive assistant job at the state Department of Labor in 2011 after Malloy, whom he had backed during the campaign, took office as governor. Caruso makes more than $78,000 a year and has worked out of a labor department branch office in his home city.

■ Former 26-year Rep. Stephen Dargan, D-West Haven, who stepped down in 2017 during Malloy’s administration to accept appointment as a $95,000-a-year member of the Board of Pardons and Paroles.

Republican legislators have been given such positions during Republican administrations, but for the past eight-plus years the Democrats have been in control of the state administration and their legislative favorites have been the main beneficiaries.