For people who think government solves problems or that your leaders are watching out for you, let me offer a counter-argument: Marietta.
Last week, the Marietta Pension Board voted 6-2 against a city council recommendation to extend pension benefits to the surviving spouses of employees who died before retirement. The decision has real current and future consequences for the city’s employees, their families and taxpayers.
For one, the vote leaves Janet Cosper, the widow of deceased building inspector Hal Cosper, with no access to the pension Hal earned over decades of work for the city.
Hal worked for the city for more than two decades when he died suddenly last year, just a few months before his planned retirement. If he had made it to retirement, the city would have allowed him to select a pension option leaving an annuity to Janet after his death, but he didn’t get that chance so the city just pocketed his money and moved on.
Last month, the council tried to fix this obvious wrong and overwhelmingly passed a recommendation that the pension plan be amended to allow widowed spouses of current employees to apply to the pension board for benefits. The council’s plan included a very limited provision to make the benefits retroactive in cases like the Cospers.
The council's strong support for reform seemed to be exactly the tonic the city needed. Those of us who followed the story took a victory lap, but after a year of being jerked around, Janet Cosper was cautious.
"I'm afraid to get my hopes up," she told me. She was right.
Mayor Steve “Thunder” Tumlin was clearly disappointed in the pension board’s decision.
“If nothing else, you’ve got to have a little bit of heart,” he said. “I wish I could’ve been in that room.”
‘They made a mistake’
According to The Marietta Daily Journal, the council's representatives on the pension board split their votes, with Councilman Johnny Walker voting for the plan and Councilman Philip Goldstein voting against.
“We’ve got some people on the pension board who didn’t see it the way I see it,” Walker said.
Walker said he would vote in favor to override the pension board’s decision, but he worries the precedent would weaken the board as an independent body.
“There wouldn’t be any use in having a pension board,” he said. “But I think they made a mistake.”
Goldstein disagrees. The plan is clear, he said.
“In order to qualify for the pension you must retire from the city,” he said. “You don’t get a pension until you retire.”
Hard to argue with that. If employees don’t like it, they can buy term life insurance to cover their families, he said.
“Your plan is based upon the document you’ve adopted,” he said. “The funding of the plan, the cost of the plan is based on actuarial estimates.”
Vote sends signal to current employees
Apart from the personal fallout for Hal Cosper’s widow, the pension board’s vote sends a message to current employees: Get out as soon as you can.
Any Marietta employee vested in the city’s pension plan who dies before retirement leaves no pension benefits to their survivors, with the exception of the small portion the city only recently started deducting from employees’ paychecks. In addition, because the city decades ago opted out of contributing to Social Security, widowed spouses don’t even have that safety net.
Right now, while you are reading this, a Marietta cop or firefighter who is vested in the city’s retirement plan risks leaving his or her family with none of their accrued benefits if they are killed on duty. It has happened before and it will happen again.
Tumlin said he has been to enough early retirement parties to know that the lack of survivorship protection is encouraging city employees to leave as soon as they are able. As any business owner will tell you, finding and hiring replacements for experienced employees is a hidden cost most want to avoid. In Marietta, that cost is passed along to taxpayers.
I’ve said it before in prior columns, but it’s worth stating again: This isn’t normal.
No public employer I’ve been able to locate fails to offer a survivor benefit. Marietta is alone here. In fact, the only reason the city gets away with it is because it’s a government, not a company. A 1970s federal law called the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, or ERISA, requires that private pension plans include a survivorship option.
Full benefits for elected officials
You know who Marietta’s city leaders have taken care of? Themselves.
City council members are eligible to receive pension benefits once they retire or get voted out, but unlike city employees their pension is not based on their $13,000 annual salaries. Instead, they get pension benefits based on the average city employee’s salary, which currently is around $47,000.
Factoring credit for time in office, that means some long-serving council members will get substantially more in pension benefits from the city than they currently receive in salary. (The longest-serving councilman is Goldstein, who’s occupied his seat since 1980 when his ward elected him at age 21.)
On top of that, the council last month voted themselves a 45 percent raise to $18,900, plus a monthly stipend for expenses.
As for Janet Cosper and the families of Marietta employees left vulnerable by the pension board’s decision, Mayor Tumlin offered this bit of comfort: “There’s always tomorrow.”
After all, he said, people don’t serve on that board forever.
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