TUA’s work on California’s pension crisis is mentioned in this post at CalWatchdog.com.
If you have not read or heard anything about California’s unfunded public employee pension crisis, you’ve probably been living under a rock or, like union bosses and too many members of the state Legislature, the governor’s office and local elected officials, you are happily in denial.
Tensions are mounting too as pension deniers or pension reform “obstructionists, as Mercury News writer Daniel Borenstein called them, are attempting to publicly shame those of us pointing out that pension liabilities could bankrupt California without serious reform.
Borenstein is joining CalWatchdog contributor Steven Greenhut and David Crane, a former California State Teachers Retirement System board member, and me for a panel on pension reform in San Francisco on Thursday.The unions have already gone on the attack about the event.
“Spotting my scheduled appearance on an upcoming conservative think-tank panel to discuss public-employee pensions, union spokesman Steve Maviglio went into Twitter attack mode last week,” Borenstein wrote for the Mercury News.
“@stevenmaviglio branded me a ‘pension basher’ and called my ethics into question. His sad attempt to divert the debate badly mischaracterizes my position and further undermines serious discussion of a complex issue.”
Fortunately as unions get louder so do the cries from taxpayers and advocacy organizations.
Christina Tobin, Founder and Chair of Free and Equal Elections Foundation and Vice-President of Taxpayers United of America, this week has been holding press conferences in California cities to draw increased attention to California’s pension crisis, including a planned event in Fresno on Wednesday and San Francisco on Thursday (in the morning before the reform panel).
Instead of denying the flood of economic problems looming because of pensions, it’s time to face the facts and fix the problem.
Christina Tobin, Vice-President for TUA, was featured in this story from WHEC TV News 10 on convicted New York public employees cashing in with pension payouts. See video of the story below.
Former public employees convicted and cashing in. Despite serving time behind bars, many public sector workers are still drawing a pension that you’re paying for with millions of your tax dollars.
You might have thought that if a public employee like a cop, a teacher or a state senator was convicted of a crime in New York, they would have forfeited their taxpayer funded pension. But until this year, that hasn’t been the case.
And we found plenty of examples of the convicted cashing in.
When former Greece Police Chief Merritt Rahn was found guilty of cover-up crimes involving two of his officers, he lost his job, his reputation and his freedom. He didn’t, however, lose his taxpayer funded pension. For the past two years, while behind bars, Rahn has been collecting a retirement pension of $55,000 per year.
“Well if he does, he doesn’t deserve it, that’s for sure,” said Greece resident Bob Warnick when we told him of Rahn’s pension.
In fact, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. We found many public employees convicted of crimes and still collecting their pensions. And it’s perfectly legal.
After digging online, we ran the names of some former dubious local public employees into a database that tracks pensions. And here’s what I Team 10 discovered:
*Former state assemblyman Jerry Johnson. Convicted of breaking into a staff member’s home in Livingston County, he retired in 2000 and now collects an annual pension of $39,807.
*Bob Morone, in prison for his part in the county Robutrad scandal…$18,790.
*Former City of Rochester inspector William Redden, who admitted to taking bribes in a bid rigging scheme…$21,376.
*Former Monroe County Sheriff’s Deputy James Telban was found guilty of misdemeanor DWI in a crash that killed a motorcyclist. He still gets his pension…$30,000 a year.
*John Stanwix, former Monroe County Water Authority chairman who pled guilty to a misdemeanor charge of steering contracts to a consulting company he owned has an staggering pension of $98,658 per year.
*Nelson Miles, Jr., formerly a teacher in Caledonia-Mumford, who downloaded child porn…$21,705.
*Crooked cop Gary Pignato, now locked up for using his badge in Greece to coerce women into sex, gets $45,494 a year.
“You shouldn’t be allowed to collect a pension after committing a felony offense and being convicted for it in relation to your job title and duties,” says state assemblyman Mark Johns.
Johns co-sponsored a bill that punishes elected or appointed public officials who violate the public trust by making them forfeit their state pensions. And last year, elements of that legislation were incorporated into an ethics reform bill, signed by Governor Cuomo, which allows prosecutors to go after public employee pensions in some cases.
Still the new law doesn’t apply to those already collecting.
“What if he received that pension in a private sector job? He certainly would still be drawing that,” says Rochester Police Locust Club President Mike Mazzeo.
Mazzeo and other critics question whether it’s fair to take away a pension that a public employee earned over an entire career.
“Someone that’s serviced for 20 to 25 or 30 years with outstanding service and the whatever the issue is, the mistake made. Does that justify reducing or taking away their pension?” asks Mazzeo.
Over the course of a retirement, those pension dollars add up.
Take the case of former Rochester Police Chief Gordon Urlacher. He had 25 years in with the department before he was convicted in 1992 of embezzlement charges. According to the New York State Comptroller’s Office, since his retirement shortly after his arrest, Urlacher has received close to one million dollars in pension payments.
“This issue only scratches the surface of the problem,” says Christina Tobin of Taxpayers United of America.
She’s been traveling the country warning of pending doom if public pension costs aren’t reigned in.
“The taxpayers, they aren’t aware that pensions are the number one budgetary problem in the United States today and we need to address this issue,” Tobin says.
Targeting felons may not fix the problem, but supporters say it’s a start.
“I think it’s a waste of the taxpayer’s money myself. If the guy’s in jail, that means he doesn’t deserve something. Why give him a good pension?” says Warnick.
I Team 10 also spoke with the local chapter of the Civil Service Employees Association (CSEA). The labor union of public employees says it supports the idea of only rewarding members with pensions who don’t violate the people’s trust.
The new ethics law, call The Clean Up Albany Act of 2011 only addresses felonies and would not automatically strip a public worker of his or her pension upon conviction. A prosecutor or the New York State Attorney General’s Office would have to essentially petition the court to withhold all or part of that pension, depending on the severity of the crime the public employee was convicted of.
Gary Heiser wrote a letter to the editor in the Pekin Daily Times featuring TUA’s three part series on the Illinois pension problem.
To the editor:The editorial on pension reform was informative, but it did not go far enough into the problem. The editorial needed to expose the obscene retirement packages that Illinois taxpayers have to fund. Not only do state employees have the option of retiring at an early age, the dollar amount of the pensions are totally out of line. Most private sector workers have to save and invest to assure they have the funds to survive their retirement years. This is not the case with the people in the State Employment Retirement System. They receive close to full pay for life. Talk about a sweet deal!
I am listing some examples of retired state employees’ pensions that I consider obnoxious. State human services retiree Sadrashiv Parwatikar retired at age 64 and receives an annual pension of $184,470. To date he has received $1,464,787. State human services retiree Kamal Modir retired at age 60 and receives an annual pension of $166,732; to date he has received $1,981,427. An example of state police pensions is $134,026 per year (John Lofton, retired at age 58 and has collected $1,077,048 to date).
The state university pensions are also out of control, two examples, Tapus K. Das Gupta, his annual pension is $426,855 and Edward Abraham has an annual pension of $414,709. All of these pensions are in the “double wow” factor.
All of the SERS pension info is available on the Taxpayers United of America website, www.taxpayersunited.org. It should be noted that all of the Springfield Democrats voted to approve the 67 percent state income tax surcharge. All of the tax dollars collected from this surcharge are being pumped into the state pension fund.
All of these pensions are an outrage and shame on our governors and congressmen (past and present) for allowing this type of thievery from the hard-working taxpayers of Illinois. With that said, I shudder to think what the pensions are for federal retirees.
— Gary Heiser, Pekin
