Herald off base on pensions editorial

In the "Our View" section of the July 1 Herald you did it again. This should be of no surprise to me or others that read your paper but it is getting to be so regular that I am not going to renew my subscription when it expires. The article shows no research whatsoever on the subject of pensions for municipal workers and uses the police pensions as an example even though you trespassed a bit into "hyperbole to wake people up." What kind of nonsense and lack of journalism is this?

Municipalities sit down and negotiate a contract with all employees for up to a four-year contract. During those negotiations they take, for example, the pensions and put those up there as a negotiating tool so that the employees will not ask for more money on a per hour basis. They have to assume that not all employees will continue on to retirement age and time in service so it is a good trade-off during the talks. Then the employees that do stay, for lower hourly salaries, I might add, get ready to retire so you and all the other people that would not work for those salaries cry poor and want to eliminate the pensions. Those pensions are paid for in part by the employees. In the case of police officers they do not get Social Security when they are old enough to collect because they did not pay into it in the first place. Unlike the teachers that you so highly praise who get their pensions entirely from tax dollars and boost their annual salaries at the end of their career so that their pensions are substantially more for the rest of their lives. This is shown on the tax bill under school pensions.

If the municipal workers made what the private sector made so far as salaries and benefits the taxpayer could not afford to pay the tax bill. In the construction field a laborer makes in excess of $33.00 per hour and that includes those flaggers you see at the beginning and the end of road work areas. They also get medical and retirement benefits to go with it. The municipal employee does not make any where near this. The benefits are why most workers who stay in the field and work two jobs to make ends meet and raise their families, and you would have those pensions removed. Keeping the tax dollar down over the long haul is the goal of the leaders of municipal government and I applaud them for it.

Do your homework and then open mouth not the other way around. By the way you can cancel my subscription any time you see fit because I will not renew at the end of this period. Good journalism is getting as rare as a good politician. Boy, what is this world coming to?

Rodney Erb

Inglelside

Rodney and Cathy Erb