Town agrees to study firefighter proposal

The town will pay for its actuary firm GRS to perform an analysis of a pension proposal made Thursday, Aug. 23 during contract negotiations between the town and the Longboat Key International Association of Firefighters Union.

During Thursday’s meeting, Town Manager David Bullock asked for more time to review the plan before both sides met again Tuesday to determine whether to ask the Firefighters Pension Board to hold a special meeting to discuss whether to pay for the study.

But at Tuesday’s meeting, which lasted just a couple of minutes, Bullock told firefighters that the town would fund the $5,000 study and asked to schedule another meeting during the week of Sept. 17.

The union’s proposal includes closing the current pension to new firefighter hires and placing them in the Florida Retirement System pension plan, instead.

If accepted, current firefighters would keep their pension plans, with some concessions, including:

• Keeping existing employee contributions at 10% of payroll;

• Reducing the multiplier used to calculate final pension payouts from 3.5% to 3% for all benefits accrued once the change is made;

• Capping final pension payouts at 85% of salary, whether an employee retires or enters the Deferred Retirement Option Program (DROP). Currently vested members, though, would not apply and could exceed that cap;

• Giving employees a certain window to enter the DROP, most likely somewhere from 30 to 90 days once an employee decides to retire;

• Cost of Living Allowance (COLA) adjustments would not begin until seven years after pension payouts had begun;

• Lowering the normal retirement years of service to 20 years at any age, or 10 years at age 55;

• Eliminating sick and vacation time in the final pension payout calculation.

Although the proposal does not fall in line with Bullock’s hard-line stance to do away with the pension program in favor of 401(a) plans, firefighter pension attorney Jim Brantley suggested at the Aug. 23 meeting that the concessions “are a substantial savings.”

“It puts people in the DROP sooner, meaning their retirement will be calculated at a lower rate and they can continue service with the town without being a pension liability for the town,” Brantley said.

Brantley said firefighters could essentially have a 27-year career with the town, with the last seven years of service in the DROP, for an average final pension payout calculation of 65% of final salary.

Although Bullock said he understood the thought process of getting employees out of the pension plan sooner, he also suggested the plan would incur costs because those employees would no longer be investing 10% of their salaries into the pension plans.