Cuomo’s preliminary pension padding report suggested that one way to curb the practice is for municipalities to cut overtime budgets. Schenectady already has halved much of its police and fire overtime budget for 2011 to respond to the city’s current fiscal crisis. The state also reformed the system this year by allowing new hires to count only 15 percent of overtime toward pension calculations.
But E.J. McMahon, director of the Empire Center for Public Policy, a research group that favors less government spending, said the only way to eliminate the problem is if the state Legislature eliminated overtime from pension calculations altogether.
“The problem is that Schenectady, like all other municipalities, will be clobbered with high pension costs of a system that has not been reformed,” he said….
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