To Operator and all who question your tax bills.... Archived Message
Posted by whatusay  on May 29, 2011, 11:29 am
this can help explain it. Let's all re-elect
Dunstan again....what's wrong with people, why do they keep putting fools like this back into office, year after year after year?
Also please note in this article the "double dipping" I have spoke of so many times within the townships and METRO EAST SANITARY DISTRICT!
'Outrageous spending' and a sweet deal: County officials reap big benefits from pension plan that pads their payments
BY BRIAN BRUEGGEMANN - News-Democrat
EDWARDSVILLE -- When Dennis Dubbelde retired last week after six years as Madison County's director of purchasing, he walked away with a pension starting at about $47,500 per year.
Dubbelde, who previously served as a Madison County Board member, took advantage of the Elected County Officials pension plan, which came under heavy criticism in the late 1990s when multiple County Board members landed other government jobs for brief periods to qualify for lucrative pensions.
Dubbelde was 57 when his friend, Madison County Board Chairman Alan Dunstan, hired him in 2005 for the newly created position of purchasing director. Dubbelde had just finished serving as Dunstan's campaign manager.
The pension plan has come under fire from critics who say some have abused the system for personal benefit.
The starting salary for the purchasing director was $53,395. Dubbelde's pay increased almost $20,000 in 6 1/2 years to $73,133 at the time of his retirement.
Dubbelde and Dunstan did not return calls seeking comment.
The Senate on May 12 unanimously approved a bill that prohibits more elected county officials from joining the enhanced pension plan. The House unanimously passed the bill, HB 3253, on April 7. The bill now awaits the governor's signature.
The ECO plan was born in 1997, when the state legislature approved it, despite concerns raised at the time that its cost to counties would be overwhelming.
The plan allowed elected county officials to retire after 20 years of service and get 80 percent of their salary. If they serve less than 20 years, they receive a lower percentage. The 80 percent calculation would be based on the employee's final salary, not an average of the final years, and the pension amount would increase annually with a cost-of-living adjustment. If the pensioner dies, his surviving spouse begins collecting 66 percent of the retiree's pension amount.
It proved to be a sweet deal for a number of Madison County Board members, whose jobs are only part-time.
For example, former County Board member Jack Frandsen, an Alhambra Democrat, left the board and was appointed county auditor, increasing his pension from less than $8,000 a year to more than $52,000. With cost-of-living adjustments since then, Frandsen's pension now is $71,000 per year. Frandsen held the auditor's job for about two years. He's received more than $635,000 so far in pension payments since he retired.
Dubbelde, a Democrat from East Alton, served as a County Board member from 1992 until 2002, when he lost a primary election. He then served as Dunstan's campaign manager when Dunstan, a Democrat from Troy, ran in the first countywide election for a County Board chairman in November 2004.
In December 2004, Dunstan, after winning the election, hired Dubbelde as the county's director of support services and purchasing, a new position that wasn't advertised. Dunstan said at the time that Dubbelde was highly qualified because of his background in information technology, and that "you'll be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn't think highly of Dennis."
Dubbelde previously worked in the information technology department at the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod's Concordia Publishing in St. Louis.
Regardless of qualifications, Dubbelde shouldn't have gotten the job because his participation in ECO was bound to make him an expensive hire, say Republicans on the County Board. His pension includes a 3 percent cost-of-living adjustment every year.
"Nothing personal to Mr. Dubbelde, but I would kindly ask Chairman Dunstan how he can honestly justify to his constituents the fact that he brought his campaign manager out of retirement, put him on the county payroll and afforded him such absurd pay increases and benefits," said County Board member Chris Slusser, R-Wood River. "There are folks here who are struggling to find jobs, pay bills, or shoulder high property taxes, and the massive new 67 percent (state) tax increase that Mr. Dunstan's political allies just passed to fund similar outrageous spending."
After the state approved the ECO program, county governments had the option of taking part in it, and Madison County was one of about 65 counties whose County Boards chose to join.
State legislators tightened the rules on the ECO program in 2000, about two years after the program began, due to what some lawmakers saw as abuses of the system. The reform prevented an employee from significantly raising his pension by jumping to a higher-paying government job for just a short time.
But before the reform took effect, about 750 people had already joined the program and were locked in under its original rules.
'It's costly to the counties'
ECO is part of the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund -- the pension system for county and municipal employees in Illinois. IMRF is not to be confused with the massively underfunded pension systems for state employees, state judges, state politicians and public school teachers.
It was the IMRF leadership that pushed the General Assembly this year to end the ECO plan. The IMRF's executive director, Louis Kosiba, said ECO was a bad idea from the start.
"It's costly to the counties, and I know that our board felt that in these financial times, it would be prudent to address what we always thought was a bad program," Kosiba said.
When asked whether Dubbelde's pension is an example of ECO's problems, Kosiba said: "No one person was the cause for the board's decision to introduce the repeal of the legislation. Overall, the program was always plagued with problems, and it was probably best just to let this program close, to sunset."
It's easy to see why programs such as ECO have problems. IMRF enrollees have to pay a percentage of their salary to IMRF. For ECO members, it's 7.5 percent of pay. For a part-time County Board member being paid roughly $10,000 per year, the contribution to IMRF is relatively small.
But if the board member later takes a county job with a much higher salary, he can get pension payments for life that far exceed the amount they paid into IMRF.
For example, Frandsen's contributions to the Illinois Municipal Retirement Fund totaled $43,225 during the years he was a county official.
"If there's a sudden upward tick in a person's salary, and the whole pension's going to be based on that, it's impossible to prefund in any rational way," Kosiba said.
IMRF uses the contributions from employees, along with earnings from investments, to pay the pensions of retirees. But when IMRF calculations show that a retiree's contributions and the investments won't cover the retiree's pension, IMRF starts charging the employer extra, in this case, Madison County.
County Administrator Joe Parente said he didn't have any figures on how much ECO is costing Madison County, because the shortfall the county has to pay to IMRF is amortized over many years, and is based on a complex formula that takes into account changing factors.
Parente said Dubbelde "had the legal right to obtain that pension, because whenever the pension law was on the books, it was available to him. Since that time, the County Board has decided that they do not believe the ECO program was best for Madison County, and they terminated it."
He added: "I think it's clear that the ECO pension program is something that, in hindsight, should have been avoided in Madison County, and when Madison County had the opportunity to get rid of it, they did. You had ECO members that took spikes in salary and benefited from the pension, and it was a cost to Madison County."
Madison County opts out
Madison County dropped out of the ECO program in 2004, after the state legislature approved a change in the law that allowed counties to stop offering it. But those who had had signed up for ECO were grandfathered in.
Besides Frandsen and Dubbelde, other County Board members who increased their pensions through ECO included:
* Tony Bosich, a Wood River Democrat who, at age 79, increased his pension by $21,410 a year when he took a job as a pump operator at the Metro-East Sanitary District. He retired four months after getting that job.With cost-of-living increases since his retirement, Bosich's annual pension payment is now $39,536. His IMRF contributions toward his retirement totaled $26,031. IMRF estimates his lifetime pension payout will be about $273,000.
* Don Rea, a Pontoon Beach Democrat who increased his pension by $22,280 by taking a job as a street supervisor with Nameoki Township for six months. With cost-of-living increases, Rea's pension payment now stands at $35,030 annually. His IMRF contributions toward his retirement totaled $18,074. IMRF estimates the lifetime cost of Rea's pension will be about $397,000.
* Albert M. Charleston, an Alton Democrat who increased his pension when he was appointed Alton comptroller, a position he served in for about two years. Charleston's annual pension is $48,912. His IMRF contributions totaled $18,018. IMRF estimates his lifetime pension payout will be about $505,800.
Slusser, the County Board member from Wood River, said: "When it comes to pensions with some of these folks, their creativity never ceases to amaze me. It's like they've earned Ph.D's in maximizing public pensions. This is a broken system that badly needs fixing. Elected officials need to be part of the solution, not part of the problem."
Current Madison County Board members enrolled in ECO:
* Larry Trucano, D-Collinsville
* Peggy Voumard, D-Alton
* M. Joe Semanisin, D-Maryville
* Kent Scheibel, D-Edwardsville
* Mark Burris, D-Wood River
Contact reporter Brian Brueggemann at bbrueggemann@bnd.com or 692-9481.
Read more: http://www.bnd.com/2011/05/29/1727522/county-officials-reap-big-benefits.html?storylink=addthis#ixzz1Nl63nagA
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Link: http://media.bnd.com/smedia/2011/05/26/16/ECO_pensions.source.prod_affiliate.98.pdf
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- To Operator and all who question your tax bills.... - whatusay May 29, 2011, 11:29 am
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