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ALBANY — Pension reform could be in jeopardy.
Even though Gov. Cuomo signed the state’s newest pension tier into law yesterday, state officials now fear a court challenge to the plan on the grounds that it was illegally approved by the state Senate.
Democrats have claimed that majority-party Republicans lacked enough senators present in the chamber for a legitimate vote on the bill.
Most Senate Democrats had stormed out of the chamber earlier to protest a limit on debate over a separate redistricting bill.
But Sen. Daniel Squadron (D-Brooklyn) stayed to argue that the Senate lacked the minimum of 38 senators needed for what he called the budget-related pension bill.
With only the 32 majority Republicans, Squadron and the four breakaway “Independent Democratic Conference” members in the Senate, just 37 of all 62 senators were in the chamber.
Republicans insisted that the pension-reform bill wasn’t budget-related and therefore didn’t require three-fifths of the Senate to be present.
Though Senate Democrats and anti-Tier VI unions yesterday denied having any plans to sue over the vote, a high-level state source said, “We expect that a lawsuit will be filed, either by the Senate Democrats or one of the public-employee unions that are trying to fight this.’’
The threat loomed as Cuomo, with Mayor Bloomberg by his side, signed the Tier VI pension bill at the Capitol yesterday.
Cuomo also warned against expecting any more pension legislation in the near future.
Conservative critics charge that the final plan for future public employees represents incremental rather than structural reform by relying mostly on increased pension contributions from some workers for the bulk of the estimated $80 billion in savings that Tier VI will generate over 30 years.
Cuomo had proposed a $113 billion savings plan, but agreed to a lower retirement age, shorter vesting period and higher salary increments for employee pension contributions than he had wanted.
Anti-Tier VI Democratic allies in the Assembly won the concessions and voted for the bill to stave off a threatened Cuomo veto of their redistricting plan — a political life-or-death deal for most lawmakers, who all face re-election this year.
Cuomo was asked yesterday whether the measure achieved enough and if any more pension reform was needed during his term, which runs through 2014.
“I don’t anticipate any additional legislation in the near future,” he said.
While unions maintained their drumbeat of criticism, state correction officers president Donn Rowe thanked lawmakers for making the bill “significantly less damaging” to future workers than the original Cuomo plan.
But Bloomberg and Cuomo said the bill was long overdue.
“This is a bill that should have been passed years and years ago . . . but better late than never,” Cuomo said.