If Mayor Bloomberg hopes to wrest from Albany the pension-reform goals he seeks and the city sorely needs, he should stop trying to pick the pockets of retired firefighters and cops.
As has been amply documented in The Post for months now, New York’s public-pension liabilities have brought the city to the brink of bankruptcy.
Change is mandatory.
But targeting retired firefighters and cops is no way to go.
At issue is the so-called Variable Supplement Fund — which provides a yearly $12,000 cash payment to retired FDNY/NYPD personnel at a cost to the city of some $600 million.
The unions say the benefit was negotiated by the Lindsay and Koch administrations; Bloomberg says it wasn’t, and he wants Albany to just scrap it.
Oddly, both sides are right on the history.
The state Taylor Law explicitly bars the city from negotiating pension benefits. But the city did it anyway — illegally, if informally. And Albany, in another of its corrupt moments, ratified the deal.
So while the mayor has standing to ask for relief, the notion is fanciful, if not fantastical: Albany simply won’t single out police and fire retirees.
Nor should it.
The mayor originally proposed cutting new FDNY/NYPD hires out of the system — and that might have flown.
But he swiftly trained his sights on current retirees — folks who served the city honorably, in the full expectation that the cash would be there when they retired.
So while the mayor almost sneeringly dismisses the payment as a “Christmas bonus” — it’s distributed at year’s end — it’s anything but a bonus. It is, de facto, a negotiated benefit.
Bloomberg would be on much more solid ground if he targeted the wink-and-a-nod system that created the liability — using it to illustrate how public pensions in New York became such a burden in the first place.
Ditto, if he moved more convincingly to seek support for across-the-board pension reform for new municipal employees. That, arguably, he could get.
As it is, he’s burning political capital by the bushel, generating enormous ill-will in Albany and endangering not only the larger pension reforms, but other initiatives critical to the city.
Like ending “last in, first out” seniority rules for laying off teachers.
Right now, he’s giving legislators who want to oppose it but are afraid to perfect cover for a “no” vote.
Nobody really likes Mike these days.
He shouldn’t make it worse.