Nearly four months after Marietta leaders expressed their concerns over a policy allowing the city to pocket the earned pensions of employees who die before retirement, little has changed.
“I know he would be livid that the city is treating me this way,” said Janet Cosper, whose husband, Hal Cosper, died a year ago this week.
Hal Cosper worked for the city for more than 20 years and was Marietta's top building official when he died suddenly of a heart attack. He had planned to retire last December and was fully vested in the city's pension plan, but city officials are resting on a provision placed in the plan in 1987 to not pay survivor benefits to his widow.
“I was told that if we did that we’d have to do it for everybody,” said Councilman Johnny Walker, newly appointed as the City Council’s representative to the Marietta Pension Board.
Walker said some 13 vested employees have died before retirement over the past 29 years, but the city has not provided a cost estimate on what it would take to repay those employees. Some, including retirement planner and Roswell City Councilman Don Horton said cost isn't the issue, since the city's pension plan was funded to pay those employees had they not died.
“They are stealing it from Hal’s estate. That’s all it is,” he said.
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