Albany pushes for $4B pension bump
State lawmakers are set to try to make it easier for teachers, cops and other state and local government workers to pad their pensions — and leave taxpayers footing the nearly $4 billion bill, a new analysis shows.
The proposed change — overwhelmingly backed by Albany, under pressure from the workers’ powerful unions in an election year — would hit city taxpayers with $163 million in added annual pension costs, according to the Empire Center for Public Policy.
“That’s a lot of cops and teachers,” said Ken Girardin, the Empire Center’s research director who wrote the report, referring to who would be affected.
“School districts and local governments would all see their pension costs rise, which would force them to either cut programs or raise taxes. The single most harmed employer is the city of New York,” he said Monday.
Pensions would be calculated largely on a worker’s final three years of salary, instead of the current five years, presumably hiking pensions since they typically make the most in their last few years.
Democrats in the Assembly and state Senate have called for boosting the pensions for governmental employees hired after 2012, known as “Tier 6” members, as part of the ongoing budget process.
The proposal would retroactively increase the pensions of workers who retired in the past two years and future pensions for roughly half of New York’s publicsector work force, Girardin said.
It would add $2.2 billion in debt for the city’s five pension plans and $1.5 billion for the New York State and Local Employees Retirement
System in the coming decades, the analysis said.
Among the biggest beneficiaries: teachers, with higher salaries than most government workers.
United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew is lobbying hard for the change along with other labor leaders, legislative sources said.
The union boss, who represents city educators, defended the proposal as pro-worker Monday.
“Our members deserve real retirement security, “Mulgrew said in a statement. “The current Tier 6 proposal will — by the city’s own estimate — increase annual city payments into the teachers retirement system by just over one percent.”
The proposals drafted by Sen. Robert Jackson (D-Manhattan) and Assemblywoman Stacey Pheffer Amato (D-Queens) were included in the spending resolutions with the blessing of Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins (D-Yonkers) and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx).