Illinois top 100 administrator's pensions

[Roy Pitchford]

http://dailybail.com/home/make-this-story-go-viral-you-thought-california-state-pensio.html
Estimated at nearly $1 trillion, for just 100 people.

I want to know where Ohio stands. How much of our taxpayer dollars in the future are going to be tied up in something like this.

[ryan costa]

The math seems to add up to a few billion dollars for those hundred superintendents over the course of about 30 years.
not 1 trillion.

you raise a good point though. How much less should school superintendents, policemen, fireman, and teachers be paid? that is an excellent political platform. how much less should they be paid. what about Generals and secreteries of state and executives of big government contractors like halliburton and blackwater. how much less should they be compensated.

[Roy Pitchford]

Alright, I misread it. Sorry.
Its nearly $1 billion.

I'd go back and fix the initial post if I could.

One state retiree, 49 years old, paid, over the course of his entire career, a total of $124,000 towards his retirement pension and health benefits. What will we pay him? $3.3 million in pension payments over his life and nearly $500,000 for health care benefits -- a total of $3.8m on a $120,000 investment. Is that fair?

A retired teacher paid $62,000 towards her pension and nothing, yes nothing, for full family medical, dental and vision coverage over her entire career. What will we pay her? $1.4 million in pension benefits and another $215,000 in health care benefit premiums over her lifetime. Is it “fair” for all of us and our children to have to pay for this excess?

http://www.nj.com/politics/index.ssf/2010/02/chris_christies_speech_on_budg.html

[ryan costa]

suggest an actual policy reform Roy.

how much should reduce the compensation of police, firemen, congressmen, presidents, generals, NCOs, Teachers, etc.

should we cap all public sector pensions at 80 percent of Median Annual wages of America? If we include the unemployed adults between 18 and 65 in Median Wages, that will knock pensions down even further. Is this a conservative idea?

[Will Brown]

I don't think anyone but a socialist can do anything about executive pay and pensions in the private sector. They are usually negotiated based on competitive pressures (this is the best person for the job; we either hire him or our competitor will) and how much benefit they will bring to the owners of the company (someone who can cause the price of tens of millions of shares of stock to increase by $3 a share is certainly worth quite a bit; someone (but not Roy) do the math). And there is little job security for them.

This (other than competitive pressures for executives) doesn't really apply in the public service sector, where value of work is much harder to evaluate, and where firings are rare.

I think the figures are even more disturbing because public service usually has an early retirement built in. While those of us on Socalled Security now have to work to 67 (I think, and headed upwards), pubic service often allows retirement in the fifties; that means we have to pay the pensions and health care longer. I have no problem with a public servant whose work involves strenuous physical activity (such as a policeman or fireman) being relieved of that strenuous activity at a fairly young age, as our bodies wear out. And I understand that they must be replaced on duty with a younger person. But I think it would be nice if we could continue their employment until full retirement age, albeit in some less physically demanding job.

But the idea that a pencil-pushing public sector employee should be able to retire so early is ridiculous. And I think the bulk of public sector workers fall in this category. I think a teacher, for example, can retire after 35 "years" of teaching. But because we allow them so much time off, including extensive holiday periods, part of each schoolday, and their voluntarily unpaid summer vacation, 35 "years" of teaching is a gross exaggeration when compared to other workers.

What's done is done, but if we want to put an end to these problems, we have to demand that public sector workers work as long as other workers before retiring, and as many hours a year as other workers; that means, for example year-round schooling.

[Roy Pitchford]

But the idea that a pencil-pushing public sector employee should be able to retire so early is ridiculous. And I think the bulk of public sector workers fall in this category. I think a teacher, for example, can retire after 35 "years" of teaching.

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe an OPERS person can retire after 30 years and get 80% of their last year's salary. I'm not sure where I've got a document from them.

For me, that means 48, because I started at 18.

You asked for me to give some specific reforms:

1. Fix the retirement age issue.
2. Don't base their payout on the previous years income. People work their butts off, doing tons of overtime during their last year on the job and get huge retirements because of it.
3. Stop double-dipping. A certain LHS principle I know of "retired" then came back the next year to be the principle at one of the middle schools. He was collecting 2 paychecks that way.

These should be a good start, I'm sure there's more I could come up with.

[Roy Pitchford]

As if on cue...
from the front of the Sunday Plain Dealer today (6/20/10)

http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2010/06/one_in_four_public_school_lead.html

Double-dipping state and local employees collect paycheck and a pension
Sarah Zatik retired two years ago, at the age of 53, but she never stopped working.

The Parma schools superintendent immediately was rehired into the same job. It was all pre-arranged, just a matter of paperwork.

The bookkeeping move brought Zatik a big financial benefit, despite a $15,000 cut in salary after being rehired. By retiring, she could start collecting well over $100,000 a year in retirement payments from the state in addition to her $158,000 superintendent's pay. Thanks to a state retirement system that allows retirement at a young age, Zatik can collect both a paycheck and her retirement payments for 12 years before she hits the standard retirement age of 65.

She is a member in an exclusive club of double-dipping superintendents, who retire and return to their same jobs or rotate to other school districts.

An analysis by Ohio's eight largest newspapers found:
One in four public school leaders in Ohio's 614 districts bring home the bacon twice.

Allowing superintendents to retire early halts their contributions into the fund and pulls millions of dollars out -- while a variety of factors threaten the fund's long-term financial health.

Superintendents point out that the practice is legal and that they would be fools not to take advantage of a pension system that permits them to retire and return to work. While many superintendents claim the practice is justified because of a shortage of qualified candidates, the Ohio Department of Education says thousands of licensed individuals meet state standards to run school districts.

Double-dipping superintendents are part of a larger state issue. About 32,000 double-dipping state and local employees collected more than $1 billion in pension payouts last year on top of their paychecks. Three-fourths of those dollars went to State Teachers Retirement System members.

...

[Gary Rice]

Ummm, not so fast here...

I would not be surprised to learn that an historic comparison between public and private sector administrative salaries would reveal a tremendous difference in potential earnings favoring the private sector. Public sector job seekers have generally looked at end of the road pension/benefit packages in order to make up for receiving relatively less money during their working years.

That was also a rationale for the establishment of many of those public sector employee pensions. You might make less during your working years, but hopefully you'd have a nice pension/benefit package waiting at the end of the day.

Granted that recently, the private sector has experienced severe business fluctuation and whenever that happens, critical eyes turn towards private sector pensions... all too often forgetting that there was a heavy financial price paid for the privilege of attaining that pension.

Were you, for example, to compare the Parma superintendent's wage/benefit package to a private sector CEO's wage/benefit package for a similar responsibility oversight of personnel and programs, I think you would find that even these days, the private-sector CEO would be making many times more than the public package offered, even when you might hypothetically compare those public sector "re-hire" situations to private-sector's executive "bonus packages".

It may be hard for some to understand, but I really still believe that, relatively speaking, public sector employees and administrators are still, for the most part, a bargain.

Back to the banjo...

[Roy Pitchford]

Federal pay ahead of private industry, from March of this year.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-03-04-federal-pay_N.htm

[Gary Rice]

Good statistics, Roy, and that's one thing that I certainly admire about you. You are quite often able to put concrete facts behind your thoughts.

And those facts are not at all at odds with my thoughts above, regarding fluctuation of the private sector. (especially recently)

In fact, I'll go you one better.

Since I was born, and as I'm sure you are aware, so many, many consumer products have stopped being made here in America.

Free trade acts have been passed, and American workers (and their unions) were forced into shifting paradigms.

And a virtual class warfare blame game erupted across our country...

The trouble was...

...whatever side you took, or whether you took the other point of view that there was plenty of room for blame on all sides... the end result was the same...

Much of America's production leading-edge technology (with those relatively high salaries for unskilled,and partly-skilled labor) is gone.

While all of this was going on, public employee jobs did indeed start to look good to a lot of people.

If it's any comfort to some who believe that the public purse strings need to have greater control.... very often these days, many new public contracts appear to result in many public employees assuming more and more of their health care costs, and many of them are also needing to take long hard looks at the viability of their present packages, when negotiation time resumes.

Many public pension funds are also under increasing long-term scrutiny and discussion, as the lessons learned from this recession start to take hold of reality.

Still, just LOOK at the huge amounts of money that continue to be raked in by so many in the private sector, even today...As private sector people continue to assert their workplace value, so will public employees.

Your public employees in a number of states have the lawful right to collective bargaining for the best deal that they can get in life. After all, they guard your homes, fight your fires, teach your children, and clean and serve your community. They need to feed their families and educate their children, as well.

Obviously, city or school board negotiations with those groups can present adversarial situations, at times. That's how the system is set up. At the same time, I do think that Lakewood has been fortunate in achieving a number of win-win situations with their bargaining units.

For everyone's sake, I hope that can continue.

As to my point about comparing private and public sector administrative packages goes however, I still feel fairly comfortable in my guessing that side by side, the private administrator would often be financially better off. It's not a prove-it point that I'm offering here; just an opinion.

I'm not trying to debate...just thinking and perceiving....

Back to the banjo...