Chief Leader – June 02, 2015
by RICHARD STEIER
Normally we are inclined to sympathize with Mayor de Blasio in his battles with Governor Cuomo, who often seems to view torturing him as a prime source of entertainment. But his continued insistence on denying cops and firefighters hired after 2009 the full Tier 2 disability benefit that existed for those who came on the job up to that point is wrong on the merits as well as on the politics.
Even worse, it began looking like a lost cause and a humiliating defeat for Mr. de Blasio by the end of last week, when the State Senate unanimously approved a bill that would essentially move city cops and firefighters hired beginning in 2010 into Tier 5, which had been adopted a year earlier and signed into law by then-Gov. David Paterson. Peter Abbate, the Chairman of the Assembly Committee on Government Employees, told us June 1–three days after the City Council finally held a hearing on the Tier 2 disability measure—that he was prepared to ask the Assembly to approve a full return to Tier 2 if the Council and Mayor did not quickly adopt a home-rule message to equalize the disability benefit.
Because Tier 5 already applies to all workers outside the city, including cops and firefighters, no home-rule message would be required, in contrast to the situation with the Tier 2 bill. And with the Governor already having expressed his support for the disability equalization, at this point the options for the Mayor are not the Tier 2 equalization vs. his own, more-modest version that would be less costly for the city. Rather, it would seem to be a choice between saving face and mending fences with the police and fire unions by joining in support of the equalization, or futilely objecting while it is implemented and needlessly alienating all others directly affected by the process.
Tier 5 was accepted in June 2009 by the two largest state-employee unions shortly after Governor Paterson vetoed the Tier 2 extender bill that for several decades had kept new cops and firefighters under Tier 2 even after it was scrapped for other employees beginning in the summer of 1976. It was onerous in its contents, reflecting the fact that the state unions signed off on it to avert the threat of 7,000 layoffs in the midst of a budget crisis. Almost immediately, the Governor, at then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s request, proposed a version of Tier 5 for city cops and firefighters that would have required new hires to work 25 years, rather than the traditional 20, to qualify for a full pension, and would have required that they wait until age 50 to collect.
Naturally, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association and the Uniformed Firefighters Association, as well as the unions representing higher ranks in their departments, fiercely opposed that plan while trying unsuccessfully to have Mr. Paterson’s veto of the Tier 2 extender overridden. The Bloomberg-backed plan eventually fell by the wayside, and when a Tier 5 measure was adopted for cops and firefighters outside the city, it preserved the 20-year retirement and the right to collect a pension immediately, regardless of age. The one aspect of the police and fire Tier 5 that was less appealing than Tier 2 was that it required a higher employee contribution toward pensions than under the old plan.
But higher contributions are also a feature of Tier 3, as is a requirement that cops and firefighters work for 22 years before qualifying for a full pension. It also requires them to stay on the job for 25 years or lose the right to cost-of-living adjustments; the sweetener in sticking around for that long is that the COLA becomes more generous than it is under Tier 2.
The PBA and the UFA have refrained from seeking rollbacks of the other onerous provisions of Tier 3 in pushing for the granting of the Tier 2 disability provision for newer hires, convinced that their best chance of getting the vastly improved coverage for those who suffer career-ending line-of-duty injuries was to not otherwise add to pension costs at a time when Mr. Cuomo in particular has been seeking to reduce them.
But Mr. de Blasio’s insistence on his proposal—under which the disability benefit would continue to be calculated at 50 percent of final-average-salary, but with an improved baseline salary level for less-experienced officers, rather than the traditional 75 percent of that average—could wind up forcing him to be saddled with the Tier 2 benefit provided under Tier 5 and the scorn rather than the gratitude of the police and fire unions and their affected members.
We believe the projections regarding the cost of the disability equalization are exaggerated, but also believe that at any price the city should not be looking to shortchange cops and firefighters forced to retire by injuries incurred while performing their duties. This is the wrong spot for the Mayor to be drawing a line in the sand, especially when it appears he will be outflanked anyway.
Mr. Paterson himself has acknowledged his regrets about the harsh reduction in the disability benefit that he imposed six years ago with his veto. Mr. de Blasio should not stand in the way of correcting that injustice.
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