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Massena village board wants state to change retirement contributions and calculations, takes fire from union official

Posted 2/6/14

By ANDY GARDNER MASSENA -- The village Board of Trustees’ Tuesday resolution urging the state to make tier three and four employees pay into the retirement system didn’t sit well with the head of …

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Massena village board wants state to change retirement contributions and calculations, takes fire from union official

Posted

By ANDY GARDNER

MASSENA -- The village Board of Trustees’ Tuesday resolution urging the state to make tier three and four employees pay into the retirement system didn’t sit well with the head of the Department of Public Works union president.

The board wants Albany to make the employees contribute three percent of their salaries toward their pensions and wants their final average salaries to be calculated using base salary without overtime.

Trustee Francis Carvel abstained from voting on both motions, citing his monthly state pension benefit. Albert “Herb” Deshaies abstained from voting on the three-percent increase. He said he wanted “more information, studying.”

Mayor James Hidy initially seemed reluctant to vote, but ultimately gave the nod to both resolutions.

“I see both sides … I don’t know how the hell to go about this,” he said.

He later justified his vote by pointing out that the resolution doesn’t change anything, it asks state lawmakers to take action.

“Let’s see where it goes. It’s just a resolution,” he said. “If a lot of people don’t like what we’re doing here tonight, I encourage them to run for public office.”

“I rise in opposition to [the] resolutions,” Mark Patterson, CSEA president for the village DPW said. “What these things do is nothing more than further ill will toward public employees.”

He feels the retirement system should be available to all, and believes the pension system is out of whack because the state in recent years eliminated 23,000 jobs that paid into the fund, but never replaced them.

Trustee Timothy Ahfeld pointed to 1999, when then-governor George Pataki axed the requirement for tier three and four employees to pay in to the retirement fund after 10 years. The stock market collapsed a decade later, which siphoned millions from the pension system.

“The fund was flush with cash” prior to that, Ahfeld said.

School districts and municipalities now make up the shortfall. The village of Massena saw its retirement rates jump $370,000 between 2011 and 2013.

Ahfeld hopes the resolutions will be mimicked throughout the area, even the state.

“This could actually spark some conversation four hours south of here, to come out with some different ideas,” Ahfeld said. “Maybe get us back to where we were before everything started.”