STATE LEADERS: YOUR LEGACY-YOUR DUTY

As a state leader, you obviously want your service to leave our state in a better position for having made the

sacrifice. That requires not only dedication, but foresight. Right now you are being pressured to abandon a

proposal that is the key to our state’s future.

To succeed in this new age of fiscal austerity, New York State needs affordable public services, performed by a highly

competent work force. That workforce is highly mobile, moving in and out of public service and between jobs. We

need to attract workers from other states and those in the middle of other careers. The old style workforce won’t

cut it and neither will the pension system that served it. Forget the fact that New York State taxpayers can’t afford

the old pension system, the fact of the matter is that that old system no longer serves today’s workforce. Today’s

public servants need more: They need an option.

Union leaders have been making some significant misstatements about Governor Cuomo’s plan to offer new

employees the choice of either the old system or a new, portable and potentially more generous plan. Why these

leaders would want to limit their members’ ability to choose is not for us to say, but facts are facts.

1. The old system provides next to nothing to employees who leave service after a few years. Right now,

people who don’t plan to keep their public job for their entire career don’t even bother to apply and we lose

valuable expertise. The new system allows these employees to take their full contributions and the full

benefit of investment with them to their next job. As a result, we could attract the best and brightest to

serve a new New York State.

2. We keep SAYING that we want business people, mathematicians, scientists and engineers to take time out

of their careers to teach in our schools and serve the public. Since they won’t have enough time in the

system to collect a meaningful benefit, the old pension system demands that they virtually eliminate those

years from their retirement plans. The new option would build those years into their existing plan and again

allow us to attract the best and brightest to public service.

3. In the old system, the spouses and children of those who die just prior to retiring are provided only three

years worth of the employee’s annual salary as a death benefit, while the system has invested many times

that amount, planning for their usual life expectancy. It’s unfair. The new system provides the full benefit

of a lifetime of investment to those families. Isn’t financial security supposed to be a benefit of public

service?

Employees deserve a choice. Taxpayers, schools and municipalities deserve a break. You deserve credit for planning for a better New York State!