Retiring has never been so lucrative — if you’re a participant in the state’s Police and Fire Retirement System.
Of last year’s system retirees, 13 percent qualified for a six-figure pension, up from under 2 percent in 2000, a conservative think tank has found in a new study.
“It shows we have a system that’s very generous . . . very costly, exposes taxpayers to massive financial risk and is not affordably sustainable,” said E.J. McMahon, director of the Empire Center for Public Policy, which conducted the study.
McMahon noted that, on average, the highest-paid public employees in New York state are police officers, who can retire after 20 years at half pay based on often massive amounts of overtime.
“The answer to making those pensions more affordable is to exclude overtime from pension calculations and make a somewhat longer working life and a minimum retirement age,” McMahon said.
Gov. Cuomo has essentially proposed doing that, raising the retirement age from 62 to 65, increasing worker pension contributions and disqualifying overtime from pension calculations for new employees.
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