A few weeks ago our blog on a joint House-Senate hearing on municipal pensions wondered what possible topics the hearing might focus on. The transcripts of the parties asked to appear at the hearing have been made public, and the main proposal the hearing considered was a piece of legislation that would unify all new police hires (hired after January 1st of this year outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh) into a single defined benefit pension plan.
One of the questions asked in the January blog was “Is there a possibility that the state wants to put new municipal hires in a unified pension system so that like PSERS (public school employees) no matter where the employee works they are in a unified statewide system for local employees?” That was also a point made in the 2015 task force on municipal pensions (see page 9 of this report).
The parties that submitted testimony (municipal associations, public safety bargaining organizations, elected officials) critiqued the legislation and offered a variety of familiar ideas for municipal pension reforms (longer vesting, higher retirement age, no overtime in pensions, not just focusing on police officers, etc.).
Based on the most recent status report on municipal pensions, there were 73,849 active members in 3,200 separate municipal pension plans (there are a combined 364,000 actives in SERS and PSERS). Over 17,000 employees were police; taking out Philadelphia and Pittsburgh (as the proposed legislation would do) takes the total down to 10,518. That’s not a perfect measurement of the size of a proposed unified police plan since those are current employees as of 2015 and there is no indication that hires after 2018 would eventually replace that full complement of police personnel, but it gives an idea of how many municipal police officers there are outside of the state’s two largest cities.
Who knows how far this proposal will proceed but leaving new non-uniformed and fire personnel as well as police in two big cities would be far from a truly consolidated plan advocates have envisioned.
