Originally, County Manager, Bobby Outten proposed offering a 25% early retirement incentive for certain employees in the higher wage bracket with the idea it would save the county money. However, Commissioner Richard Johnson wasn't happy with the amount and pushed to have it increased to 50% of the employee's base salary.
During Monday's presentation, Outten said two employees were offered the incentive (50%) and accepted it. EOD has learned, from reliable sources, the two employees are the Planning Director and the Information Technology Director. Their salaries are $111,228 and $106,032, respectively.
Apparently, not all eligible county employees were given the offer.
Tillett said, "I want to apologize to any of our workers who got a misunderstanding on their early retirement. I'm really sorry that happened". Tillett said she had been approached by workers about the matter. "Early retirement, in my opinion, should have been for anyone who's eligible for it," said Tillett.
"And even though we were trying to make a dollar off our early retirement, morally, we weren’t clear, so folks got the wrong impression and now their feelings are hurt. I apologize to those people," she said.
According to a list of 26 eligible employees reviewed by the county commissioners, the Information Technology Director has 27 years of service and qualified under the "Age 65 with 5 Years Service" rule.
The Planning Director was not on the list, but has qualified years of service with other local governments, for example the Town of Kill Devil Hills.
According to the list, the Director of the Board of Elections has 39 years of service and was one of 13 employees who had at least 30 years of service. However, none of these employees are among those who will get the incentive.
According to the method of computing retirement benefits within the Local Government Retirement System, benefits are paid, based upon the "Average Final Compensation (AFC)" The AFC is the average of the four highest consecutive years salaries. Normally, these are the last four years before one retires. The "maximum" annual benefit usually amounts to approximately 55% of the AFC figure. If a retirement incentive of $58,000 qualifies to be computed into one's AFC it would raise that amount by approximately $14,500 per year and result in approximately $8,000 per year in additional retirement benefits for life.
Finally, in what appears to be a shell game with the payout, Outten told the commissioners the plan was to pay this incentive of approximately $108,000 from this year's budget, and it will reflect in the savings for next year's budget. Go figure.
EOD thinks there is something about this maneuver that smells very badly. And, we wonder what the taxpayers and the rest of the county employees think about it.
=====================================================================
7 comments:
If the county has this money to throw around I'm sure the remaining employees would like to have their full longevity benefits back. They were reduced over a year ago.
Surely as a retired State of NC employee you should know that state statutes SPECIFICALLY exclude retirement incentives from the retirement calculation.
Sorry, Anon, I didn't know that; because in 30 years of state government employement I never saw or heard of an early retirement cash incentive. That's the reason I used the word "if" in the blogpost. Thanks, for your input.
I don't know about NC law, but cash early retirement incentives have been used in other states for public employees. I just think it is VERY wrong to offer it to only two people out of all that would have been eligible. That sounds very hand-picked.
OK, that settles it for me.
Richard Johnson should be enjoying his LAST term as a County Commissioner.
As Anon said, "hand-picked" INDEED. Which is par for the course here in Good Ol' Boy County.
Don't these two top-dog positions need to be re-filled? What will those salaries be when replacements are found?
Actually no, we know what they'll do!
The County will hire those two top-dogs back as "consultants" with even higher pay on TOP of the cushy early-retirement incentives they'll be enjoying forever.
Good work, Richard Johnson. Reeeeaaaaal good work.
Damn the county commissioners for trying to accommodate selected employees with early retirement. What kind of short-term goal is this? A long-term solution would be to re-instate the 20 year retirement instead of the current 30 year plan. With such deficits and fear of more to come, the last thing I want hear is an apology. Where is this apology when our taxes are about to go up? How about when the Justice/Administrative Center was built? How about the cost of maintaining them? Or when certain schools were built even when voted down? I tell ya...I'd make some real cuts starting with the commissioners downward.
I'm so disgusted with the whole lot of the commissioners! Put a working mother of three in there! She'll tell you how to make a budget and save money! She'll have compassion for the hardworking employees who really deserve it. She sure would not give $50,000 to someone who makes $110,000 per year to go home and sit on their butts and get paid to do nothing!
Stupid is as stupid does!
Post a Comment