NY’s Pension $queeze

Don’t hate retired sanitation worker Eugene Egan for his city pension of more than twice the $128,189 top salary he earned in 2015, his last year on the job; blame the politicians who created a system that saddles taxpayers with a ticking pension time bomb.

Egan worked into his 80s. And it’s a similar story with reigning pension king Edgar McManus, a retired Queens College history prof who raked in $561,286 last year.

Statewide, according to the Empire Center for Public Policy, more than 3,000 retired educators drew pensions greater than $100,000 in 2017. City Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña drew a $215,582 pension on

top of her $233,430 salary. In the city, 853 Tier 1 members (including Egan) still collect pensions that figure in unused vacation days, overtime and an annual 2 percent cost-of-living-adjustment.

The city’s ’70s-era fiscal crisis put an end to Tier 1 generosity: Since 1973, five new pension tiers have trimmed benefits for succeed- ing generations of state and local workers.

Still, New York public workers continue to get defined-benefit pensions even as the private sector has largely shifted over to 401(k) syle defined-contribution retirement plans.

Which means that when public pension funds fall short, it’s entirely up to the taxpayers to make good.

Add in rising life expectancies and much higher base pay, and the pension costs to taxpayers continue to mushroom by billions of dollars — a spiral that has pensions consuming ever-larger shares of state and local budgets.

The latest revision, Tier 6, gives nonunion employees earning above $75,000 a year the option of selecting a 401(k)-style plan — which also lets you build retirement savings even if you don’t stay on the public payroll for a decade or more to vest.

But such tinkering at the edges is only a taste of the whole-hog reform that’s needed before pension costs leave New York governments unable to spend on anything else.