(
)
ALBANY — What pension time bomb?
Seemingly oblivious to widespread warnings of a looming public-pension crisis, state lawmakers have introduced dozens of bills that would pad already lucrative retirement benefits and hike taxpayer costs by nearly $1 billion, a study released yesterday found.
Lawmakers have introduced at least 55 pieces of legislation this year to give state workers more-generous benefits and allow governments to kick costs down the road, the Citizens Budget Commission found — exactly the opposite of what Gov. Cuomo and Mayor Bloomberg say is needed.
“It’s astonishing that these bills would be introduced in the fiscal climate,” CBC President Carol Kellerman said. “The bills reflect no acknowledgement of the financial burden that taxpayers already bear.”
Some pension “sweeteners” identified by the watchdog group would roll back the pension reforms implemented by former Gov. David Paterson just two years ago.
Others would turn back the clock to re-establish luxurious benefit formulas done away with during the 1970s fiscal crisis.
One bill — sponsored by pension-oversight chiefs Assemblyman Peter Abbate Jr. (D-Brooklyn) and Sen. Martin Golden (R-Brooklyn) — would extend to school districts a controversial scheme to let local governments borrow against future pension returns to pay current retirement costs.
The bills that provide cost estimates would increase pension costs by $860 million, including $300 million to the state and $560 million to local governments.
Several bills don’t even provide estimates of the cost.
While most are “one house” bills that lack necessary sponsorship in both legislative bodies, Kellerman says their mere introduction shows a disconnect from the state’s pension predicament.
Abbate, who heads the Democratic-led Assembly’s Governmental Employees Committees and sponsored many bills, dismissed the report as “a cheap shot” and said much of the proposed legislation would never pass.
Kellerman “should spend more time worrying about serious problems we have than putting out nonsense like this,” Abbate said.
The bills were introduced even as Cuomo and Bloomberg push the creation of yet another less generous pension tier to rein in costs that have skyrocketed due to numerous factors, including previous sweeteners, massive market loses and the growing ranks of retirees.
A recent analysis by the business-backed Manhattan Institute determined that the state’s public-pension funds are underfunded by $120 billion and that taxpayers will have to shell out $8.5 billion over the next few years to keep them in the black.
Golden, who heads the Senate Pension Committee, insisted that the two bills carried by him and cited by the CBC would help keep a short-term jump in costs from causing long-term pain for both employers and pensioners.
“The Senate is obviously very concerned about rising pension costs across the city and the state of New York,” Golden said. “But there’s a spike here, and we want to make sure we put out some bills that could alleviate these pressures on local governments and school districts and individual employees.”