The retiring Camden mayor -- and who knows how many others -- are waiting for Santa Steve and others to bring them sweeteners for their pensions.
Noble motives are not behind many bills that pass the New Jersey Legislature in the waning days of a session. End-of-year vote marathons often include clunkers that legislative leaders hope will have insufficient time to generate negative momentum before the measures become laws.
That brings us to S-3620, which is now more than halfway through both houses. A Politico.nj wag has dubbed it the "Get Dana Redd ... a Better Pension Act of 2017."
The bill revisits the bad old days when people could hold as many elected posts as they could win at the same time, a practice that was abolished around 2008 for most, but not all, multiple officeholders. Upon being elected as mayor of Camden in 2009, then-State Sen. Redd became one of the first lawmakers to have to choose one job over the other.
Previous dual officeholders, such as state Sen. Stephen Sweeney -- who served simultaneously as the Gloucester County freeholder director -- could hang on to two posts as long as they'd been elected to both before the one-per-customer rule took effect. It was a "grandfather clause," or, more appropriately, a "Bad Grandpa" clause. S-3620 one-ups the loophole by adding a "Bad Santa" clause.
What the bill does is put Redd back into the main public pension system, the one that's $90 billion in debt, for all of her time as mayor. Newly elected officials -- and Redd was newly elected as mayor -- were supposed to get retirement credits in a less-costly 401(k)-type fund. Now that she's retiring as mayor, the formerly frozen state pension credits she accumulated before 2010 would thaw out. Her pension would then be based on her higher salary as mayor, and the extra time that she qualified.
One might argue that Redd's service was continuous, since she jumped from lawmaker to mayor with no break. Certainly, that's what Sweeney argues. It figures that the grandfathered officeholder-in-chief would be behind the new bill, although he's not its sponsor. (Sweeney eventually gave up his freeholder seat once he'd been tapped as Senate president.)
Redd might not get a lot more money in the overall scheme of things, although we don't know how many other office-switchers also qualify for fattened pensions under S-3620. But this is about entitlement, about heading backwards in shoring up the pension funds, and about hubris. Lawmakers tried to pass nearly identical legislation in 2014, but shelved it after a public outcry.
Redd knew the score about her retirement when she switched hats. She won't starve if she has to cobble together disbursements from her 401(k) with the public pension she earned before she became mayor. And, who knows what pension-padding public job she'll claim next if she's back in the Public Employees Retirement System?
S-3620 passed the Senate on Monday, 23-9. It raced through the Assembly appropriations committee the same day. There isn't a full Assembly voting session until Jan. 4, so there's time to make noise and stop this runaway train.
If our letters to the editor are indicative, Sweeney requires regular praise from those he helped to get jobs on the way up, almost as much as President Donald Trump. So, maybe the senate president will vaguely recognize the appeal below:
"State Senate President Stephen Sweeney, D-Gloucester, is absolutely (wrong) to fight for S-3620, which is (not) common-sense legislation that proves that the senator is always working to improve the lives of (Dana Redd, and other well-connected officeholders). His constituents are fortunate to have him represent the (political) class."
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