“DON’T PAD THE TAB”

By Raymond Edmondson, Jr., CPPT

CEO, Florida Public Pension Trustees Association

Not satisfied trying to scapegoat public employees for Wall Street’s greedy excess, public pension plan

foes now are trying to further frighten taxpayers about the possible costs of supporting public employees

in retirement. A widely published paper issued by the LeRoy Collins Institute at Florida State University

(February 10, 2011) tries to marry the costs of public pension plans and the rising cost of health

insurance, suggesting local governments (taxpayers) will have to pay the tab.

“Tough Choices – Trouble Ahead” hangs its hurtful argument about the cost of supporting public

workers on the fiction that local governments are “implicitly” required to provide health insurance

benefits to public employees in retirement. The public needs to be told the truth.

Local city, town and municipal employers are not required to pay for healthcare insurance for

retirees. We know of none that do. Retirees are merely permitted to purchase their own health insurance

through the employer’s plan. Rolling the potential costs of healthcare that are now paid for by employees

into the projected cost of a pension plan is a strategy designed to scare taxpayers and artificially inflate

the price of pensions. And it’s not likely a coincidence the study was released during very high profile

public hearings by Senator Jeremy Ring’s Government Oversight & Accountability Committee, the group

tasked to respond to Governor Rick Scott’s call for pension reforms.

Americans in both the private and public sectors absolutely have a healthcare insurance problem

– especially the 47 million Americans who have none. But make no mistake, this is not now and should

not become part of any discussion about public pensions. Dragging healthcare into the equation is an

attempt to cast further disparaging and misleading facts into the public discussion about the cost of public

pensions. It is wrong.

We have other problems with this purported policy paper, including one suggested way to curb

retirement costs to local governments by “reducing the transferability of retirement benefits to spouses

and dependents”. Imagine trying to explain this “cost saving” suggestion to the families of Miami

Detectives Roger Castillo and Amanda Haworth who were gunned down on January 20th; or to the

families of Sgt. Thomas Baitinger and Officer Jeffrey Yaslowitz who were murdered just four days later

in St. Petersburg, four of 11 police officers killed in just 24 hours in five states.

We sympathize with the suffering of Americans everywhere during this painful economic

recession. We support the belief that every American deserves a pension. We want taxpayers and our

elected officials to make decisions based on real facts, not fear mongering. We hope people will read the

LeRoy Collins Institute paper carefully, and then we hope they will read between the lines.