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Dead Constitution See other Dead Constitution Articles Title: Lawmaker wants to ban taxpayer-funded pensions for non-government employees Future hires of three private lobbying groups should be excluded from New Jersey’s taxpayer-funded pension system, a lawmaker said Monday. Assemblyman Paul Moriarty, D-Gloucester, said he will introduce legislation to alter a 1950s-era law that permits non-government employees to collect public retirement benefits. The pension fund has a $30 billion unfunded liability, and a state audit issued last week suggested that pension overseers reduce operating costs and apply the savings — potentially millions of dollars — to that liability. Moriarty’s proposal would cut off future employees of the privately run New Jersey School Boards Association, the state League of Municipalities and the New Jersey Association of Counties. It would not affect workers currently on the payroll. The groups get their operating budgets from taxpayer-funded membership dues and from corporate sponsors. They say that they provide their members with valuable guidance on regionalization, shared services, legal liability, ethics and other issues, and that their expertise ultimately saves taxpayers millions of dollars a year. Right now, taxpayers give $1.3 million a year to 62 retirees of the three organizations, The Record reported last month. An additional 107 current employees have pensionable salaries of more than $7 million. The groups were allowed to participate in the pension system many decades ago, when lawmakers determined they were acting in the interest of taxpayers. Since then, the associations have greatly enlarged their staffing and salaries, and all have expanded to offer annual conferences, training sessions and other services that taxpayers help to finance in the form of fees and travel. “I don’t understand how anyone could have said these organizations should be part of a state pension plan,” Moriarty said. His legislation also would include employees of “improvement districts,” organized to boost commerce in faded downtowns. Chris Christie, the incoming Republican governor, has called the groups’ arrangement “crazy” and said it must be altered. Moriarty would like to remove all the associations’ employees from the system, but said he would run into legal obstacles. “I think we would end up with a large lawsuit and I don’t think we would win,” he said. “They were granted these pensions and it’s pretty hard to take something away that the state guaranteed them and they paid into.” Bill Dressel, executive director of the League of Municipalities, said Moriarty’s bill appeared to be a good compromise. “We’re glad to see it would apply to future hires and would not unfairly punish those who have complied and paid into the system for the past 55 years,” he said. But he added that any legislation should apply also to union leaders, employees of government insurance pools and others who were granted access to the pension fund. “If there’s going to be a review, there should be a comprehensive review,” Dressel said. Frank Belluscio, a spokesman for the School Boards Association, said he had not yet seen the proposed legislation. He said the group supports reform of the pension system if the changes “would be in local school districts’ interests.” Peter Palmer, incoming president of the New Jersey Association of Counties, said the group would support some change. "As long as the legislation is fair to current employees and retirees, we'll certainly cooperate," he said.
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"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards." — Claire Wolf: 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution (1996)
One small step for man... :)
In 2007, the FBI reported on concern about white supremacists recruiting soldiers, saying "hundreds" of neo-Nazis were in the active military. But in April, a Department of Homeland Security report on extremism that reiterated much the same point was widely criticized by veterans groups and some conservative politicians as being unpatriotic, leading the Justice Department to retract the DHS report. Critics acknowledge that extremism in the Army is a touchy political subject. |
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