With his career in public service over, ex-Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver promptly filed for retirement Tuesday — a day after his conviction on corruption charges. Silver stands to get a pension of as much as $98,000 a year because of his 44 years of public service and a salary that had reached $121,000 when he was collecting his base salary of $79,500 a year and $41,500 as speaker, the Empire Center estimated. Read More
It will be déjà vu all over again Monday for a Brooklyn Supreme Court judge, as lawyers for the city and a municipal pension fund argue that basic data about correction officer retirement payouts should be secret. The session before Justice Peter Sweeney will be the latest legal stonewalling in cases that stretch back almost six years to the day that the Empire Center, a taxpayer watchdog, filed a Freedom of Information Law request for the names of public pensioners and their annual payments. Read More
Still betting far too heavily on the stock market, New York State's main state and local government pension fund lost money in the first half of its current fiscal year. Read More
Starting next year, New York's state government plans to (finally) stop deferring a portion of its annual required pension payments—but over the next 10 years, it will still have to repay $3.3 billion it owes on pension fund borrowings since fiscal 2011. Read More
The Nassau County Police Department is bracing for at least 70 retirements through the end of the year as officers take advantage of overtime earned during superstorm Sandy to boost their pensions. Read More
The state's Teachers Retirement System said its rate of return was 5.2 percent for last fiscal year and will lower its expected rate of return from 8 percent to 7.5 percent a year. Read More
The New York State Teachers' Retirement System (NYSTRS) earned only 5.2 percent on its investments—well short of its assumed rate of 8 percent—during the fiscal year ending last June 30. But taxpayer contributions to NYSTRS, already due to drop by more than four full percentage points of covered payroll in school year 2015-16, nonetheless are projected by the system actuary to decrease by a little bit more (up to 1.76 percentage points) in 2016-17. Read More
New York City firefighters and fire officers who retired during the 2015 fiscal year were eligible for average pensions of $113,341 pension, a nine percent increase over the previous year, according to data posted today on SeeThroughNY, the Empire Center's transparency website. Read More