A new Tier V pension plan for public employees became a reality Thursday as Gov. David Paterson, accompanied by a slew of lawmakers, signed legislation to reduce the cost of the state’s massive retirement system.

The new plan, while still generous by private sector standards, is expected to save taxpayers more than $35 billion over the next three decades by raising the retirement age for future public sector workers and requiring greater contributions.

Tightening up the benefits, Paterson said, was necessitated by a retirement boom and the need to control costs.

“As time has gone on, we simply do not have the revenues to support it,” the governor said of the current plan, which hasn’t changed in almost 30 years.

Pension reform “is a way to alleviate for the next generation some of the problems we are having right now,” he said.

Much of the pension issue has become linked to the debate over property taxes. It was therefore no accident the ceremony took place on Long Island, which has become ground zero for what incumbent politicians fear is a brewing suburban taxpayer revolt.

Unable to handle ever-rising school and property taxes, voters last November vented their frustration against incumbents and turned out several longtime county officials in Westchester and Nassau counties, and elsewhere around the state.

Among those defeated at the polls was Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi, a onetime gubernatorial aspirant and one of the driving forces behind Tier V through his work on a property tax commission created by former Gov. Eliot Spitzer.

“People are angry about taxes,” said Suozzi, a Democrat. “We’ve known that for a long time, but this time it’s really become crystallized.”

The new pension plan also could be viewed as a needed win for Paterson, whose approval ratings are below 30 percent and who has been battling the Legislature, particularly Senate Democrats, over budget-cutting efforts.

In keeping with Paterson’s desire to be pictured as a politician who is concerned with taxpayers, the governor’s office posted an online savings calculator that lets the public estimate how much their local school system, city, county or other entity will save over the next 30 years with the changes.

The Albany School District, for instance will save $89 million over three decades, while Clifton Park will save almost $3.5 million and the city of Schenectady will save $35 million. Estimated savings depend on the size and pay scales of the given work forces.

Overall, the governor’s office predicted the Capital Region will save $2 billion over 30 years, compared with what would have been paid under the current plan.

Not everyone is convinced that the savings are meaningful. “I’d be embarrassed to walk around touting this as significant reform,” said E.J. McMahon, director of the Empire Center for Public Policy, a fiscally conservative think tank.

Noticeable savings, McMahon said, won’t start for a decade; also, $35 billion is a “drop in the bucket” compared with the state’s long-term pension costs.

State payments alone, McMahon said, are scheduled to triple to $2.9 billion by 2013.

He also noted the bill includes some sweeteners, such as a planned early retirement incentive for teachers next year and language ensuring that teacher’s retirement health benefits won’t erode over time.

“This ties the hands of local school district management in containing the costs associated with retiree health insurance,” noted a bulletin from the Citizens Budget Commission, another watchdog group.

With the new Tier V applying to public employees hired after Jan. 1 and the state in a hiring freeze, it was difficult to gauge the reaction among people seeking state employment.

Despite the hiring freeze, a certain number of people are constantly joining the public payroll, especially for jobs such as prison guards, health aides or nurses. Those people need to be replaced when they leave in order to meet statutory staffing requirements in public institutions.

For example, 47 people have joined the state payroll this month, said David Ernst of the state Civil Service Commission. When people are hired it is up to the individual agency and the Division of Budget, which must sign off on new hires.

New York’s executive branch directly employs more than 100,000 people, with several times that working in the state’s towns, cities, counties and schools.

Even with a freeze, there will be some people hired just before the change.

“If they are going to be in Tier IV, they’ve got to be in within the next three weeks,” said Darcy Wells, a spokeswoman for the Public Employees Federation, a major state union that includes workers such as institutional nurses. She said she hadn’t heard of any additional rush or clamor by people seeking to get in under the wire.

That relative calm, however, could be due to the fact that public employees aren’t tuned in to their retirement benefits until they join the public payroll.

Once that happens, many appear to keep a close eye on their benefits — as illustrated by an incident last July when the phone switchboards for unions and the comptroller’s office were briefly flooded by state workers.

It turned out there was a rumor that people might have been able to join the oldest and most generous pension scheme, Tier I, due to a loophole. The speculation turned out to be unfounded.

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