Please consider reviving the early retirement incentive that was passed under the late Ella Grosso in which the employee’s age, length of credited service and a five year chip must equal at least 75 for a SERS or TRB participant to retire. As generous as a five year chip may sound, you can offer to close SERS participation to new employees hired after the last effective date of the ERIP. The long term trend of employers in the US has been to close defined benefits plans and offer defined contributions plans instead.

You can offer a 401(k) that’s similar to the Alternate Retirement Program (5% employee contribution and 8% employer match) for newly hired employees. The difference in the current fringe rate is 33.99% of SERS less 9.57% of ARP equals 24.42% of the employer costs of contributions saved!. This would justify to re-amortize the SERS pension fund and diminish the $9.3B of unfunded liability since in the future no newly hired employee would be drawing upon the SERS pension fund.

If you implement the above you would open the door for a vast majority of Tier 1 employees to retire with dignity. As a last ditch offer to make it appealing for management, you can offer that SERS Tier 1 formulas to calculate pensions for credited service close as of the last effective date of the ERIP. Any remaining employees participating in Tier 1 would revert to Tier 2 formula to calculate pensions for any prospective credited serve and maintain the Tier 1 formula for service previous to the closing date of this ERIP.

The above suggestion should save the State plenty of money to keep the health benefits and co-pays the same!

Thank you for providing state employees with INTHISTOGETHERCT.ORG discovering that state agencies were circulating copies of a letter the Governor is expected to deliver to the legislature sometime this week.

In respect for the outstanding work the SEBAC coalition has done for thousands of state workers since its inception and is in the process of continuing with the current administration and legislature during the current economic situation , your comments regarding the Governor’s energies being better directed back to the discussions with SEBAC are understood. As is the guiding principle of regarding protecting public services and respecting the people who provide those services.

The fact that SEBAC has continued persuit of the 2003 lawsuit of the Rowland administration layoff of 2,800 state employees exemplifies the coalition’s dedication. The layoff of any employee is unfortunate and hopefully can be avoided during these current economic times.

Echoing your theme of not wanting to see these mistakes repeated, it is worth noting that history has shown that despite SEBAC’s best efforts in 2003, the Governor/legislature was granted wide latitude regarding state employees(court rulings to date upholding the unilateral decsion to allow layoffs and an ERIP). Interestingly enough 6,000 union paying members were able to benefit from the ERIP.

I trust that the 16 union presidents representing the members of each local keep this in mind as they attempt to negotiate a package based on the guiding principle of protecting public sevices and respecting the people that provide those services. Hopefully, the scheduled up coming meetings yield an ERIP for those members able to benefit from such an offer as proposed without a breakdown in negoations as occurred in 2003 and severely compromising the valuable services provided.

In light of the fact that there is an unresolved suit over the 2003 layoff of 2,800 Ct. state employees and a recent court decsion upholding the California Gov’s wage freeze and furlough days, accomplishing this without opening the door for widespread layoffs and NO early retirement incentive program will be delicate.