Late pay raises are one way to fatten workers’ state pensions

A three-part series by The Associated Press

o Today: Late pay raises mean jumps in pension benefits under some state-funded plans.

o Monday: Medical benefits tied to retirement system threaten local government finances.

o Tuesday: A look at government workers who retire on disability and then return to physically-demanding activities.

LAKEWOOD — By the end of 2009, three veteran managers at Lakewood Fire District 2 earned salaries that topped $175,000 annually — more than Seattle’s fire chief, who was overseeing a department roughly 10 times as large.

Their pay would soon grow even bigger, if only briefly.

Just four days before Michael McGovern and Greg Hull were set to retire, their annual salaries jumped by more than $17,000 each, in part due to a late contract addendum. Bob Bronoske got a similar increase just 13 weeks before he departed, putting each of their compensation rates around $200,000.

The last-minute pay raises cost taxpayers in the Tacoma suburb for only a brief time. In the long run, however, they may end up draining a state-run pension plan of $1 million or more, since the adjustments boosted each of the men’s lifetime retirement payments by about $1,000 per month.

Bronoske and McGovern retired in their mid-50s, and each is now drawing more than $150,000 in pension payments every year.

Hull’s pension is $184,000 annually. He has separately taken a job as the fire chief in the small city of DuPont — hired as a “contractor” in a way that doesn’t disrupt his retirement payments — bringing his current compensation to over $300,000.

Statewide issues

Lakewood’s case is not an isolated one in Washington, according to a two-year Associated Press investigation that included more than 100 interviews, 94 public records requests and a review of thousands of pages of government emails, meeting notes, contracts, actuarial reports and payroll records along with more than 30 government datasets.

Some findings:

• Even while state and local budget cuts imposed salary reductions over the past five years, the average first responder retiring into the so-called LEOFF-1 pension system had a pay rate in their final three months of work that was 5.5 percent higher than the same period a year earlier. The increase was much larger than workers received in any other pension system in the state and more than double the average raise for all workers who departed over that time period, the AP found.

“That seems outrageous,” he said.

The pay raises in Lakewood were approved legally by a board of fire commissioners, which meets for hearings with minimal public attendance, though it’s not clear whether the raises should have qualified as pensionable earnings under state rules.

All of the late salary increases reviewed by AP came during times of budget and economic struggles over the past five years. At the meeting during which the Lakewood salary addendums were approved, in the middle of national economic turmoil, commissioners talked about their own financial problems and the need to find cost-saving measures.

That same night, the board asked some workers in the district to contribute more to cover their medical costs.

ooo

Raises also helped encourage retirements in places like Kelso and Quincy. Meanwhile, some long-time chiefs in places like Walla Walla and Mason County got big raises before their retirements, with local officials arguing that the leaders weren’t being properly compensated.

In other cases, officials used carefully crafted contracts and let workers decide whether they wanted to retire when temporary raises were in effect.

Over in Bremerton, a contract clause brokered between city officials and the local firefighters’ union in 2009 provided a temporary pay increase of 12 percent to a remarkably narrow group: lieutenants and captains in the LEOFF-1 system who had served 30 years and one month with the department. The unusual pay increase, according to the negotiated contract, lasted only 30 days.

During that month, three workers retired with salaries that were each roughly $1,000 a month larger than they were just weeks prior.

Bremerton Fire Chief Al Duke said in an interview that the city was hoping to encourage some retirements in order to save on salaries and bring in younger workers who don’t cost as much. He said officials told the LEOFF-1 retirees that it was a one-time deal that they could take but that it wouldn’t be offered again.

“We were actually saving quite a bit of money,” Duke said.

The raises for those three workers now cost the state pension system about $30,000 extra per year.

Across the Puget Sound, officials in Renton also cited the budget in an even broader effort that boosted pensions.

Auditors didn’t have as much success in a 2006 case in which the North Highline Fire Chief Russ Pritchard saw his salary jump 57.5 percent to nearly $200,000 per year — three months before retirement. His monthly pension benefit is now more than Pritchard was paid in salary in the months before his late raise.

After state retirement officials questioned whether the money was designed as a retirement incentive package, the district denied that intention and then adopted a resolution making the new salary permanent, even for the incoming chief. That placated the concerns of retirement officials, who saw the raise as simply a readjustment of how the chief’s position was compensated in general.

Meeting minutes obtained by AP, however, say the board of fire commissioners had offered him a “severance package” that he was accepting.

In 2010, the district eliminated the fire chief position — and the salary — altogether.

Sonntag, who was state auditor at the time the assessments took place, said he believes officials involved in both cases were participating in a concerted effort to egregiously abuse the system.

“How does that pass anyone’s common-sense test?” Sonntag asked.