Walking around with our state pension problem
One ad notes most of us are paying for 5 percent of the state population to retire early with too-healthy pensions. Another dueling ad features public workers noting they did their jobs and contributed significantly to their pensions, and politicians now are trying to take them away. “Anyone who thinks that's right should take a walk in my shoes,” the ad intones.
After learning about a suburban administrator making more than his boss and getting 20 percent raises three different times, maybe walking in other people's shoes is some sound and solid advice.
Daily Herald Staff Writer Jake Griffin's debut Tax Watchdog column this week revealed the eye-opening contract history of Mohsin Dada, Schaumburg Township Elementary District 54 assistant superintendent. Dada makes far more than his district's chief. At a salary of $341,747 last year, he was the state's third highest paid public school employee and got 22 percent raises three times in a seven-year contract.
“That's what a lot of districts were doing at the time,” District 54 board member Bill Harper told Griffin, adding he doesn't feel bad about it. He and others praised Dada's performance, noting he balanced the district's budget for the past 15 years.
Dada may have balanced the budget, but pension sweeteners like this one have contributed to throwing the state's budgeting out of whack.
Dada will start with a $250,000-a-year pension, Griffin reported, and get annual cost-of-living adjustments. Sure, we'd all love to walk in Dada's shoes. What would be better and smarter would be if all school board members thought more about the long-term effect of walking in the shoes of all the taxpayers footing these pension bills.
Dada's is not the only example of pension extravagance. The Daily Herald's “Pension Time Bomb” series published last year detailed 131 school retirees getting pensions at or above $150,000 annually. Most are administrators. And just a few months ago, five-figure, multiple “longevity” salary bumps granted to Dale Falk, Mount Prospect Elementary District 57's business manager, caused a stir.
Look, we understand that the majority of annual pension payments for public employees are not anywhere near a quarter-million dollars. In fact, the average teacher pension is $42,782 annually, according to the Teachers' Retirement System. We greatly appreciate the critical work of teachers, emergency workers and other public employees.
And yes, Springfield politicians certainly are guilty because they, too, didn't think long-term when they created multibillion-dollar pension deficits by failing to properly fund pensions for many years. We believe that was shameful.
Still, we also know many private-sector workers no longer receive any company contributions to their retirement funds, or receive much smaller contributions than they once did. Those are shoes all of us ought to walk in, too.
Some fixes were approved last year for new state workers. We've said before, and still believe, that a proposal to change the pension benefits system for the rest of employees' future earnings makes sense and is a fair solution for all. It would not take away benefits already accrued by those workers.
It's good news that a recent law now requires that school boards that award raises above 6 percent in the last years of an educator's career must reimburse taxpayers for the extra expense of that subsequent pension bump.
But 6 percent at career's end still is too high a threshold to kick in the reimbursement clause.
In fact, what if just the taxpayers in individual school districts were on the hook for the pensions of their employees for life?
Really. Think about it. What if Dada had to figure a way for only District 54 taxpayers and employees to finance his pension and all the other district employees for their projected life spans? Might it add some greater accountability?
We'll walk out on a limb and guess that school board members would not be giving Dada and others anywhere near the pension payouts they're now due.