re: MPERS Refuses To Pay New BRPD Retirees Retirement Benefits

No need to worry little sheep.. the sheepdog’s at BRPD will keep the wolf from your door.

If a retirement system allowed overtime to be considered for the member's average compensation, everyone would work a shitton of overtime in order to inflate their wages and increase their retirement. The statutes would say what kinds of pay would count towards a member's average compensation. Cell phone allowances, uniform allowances, overtime, per diem, housing allowances ect..... This is nothing new, just the latest example of ignorant folks getting elected to office and not having a freakin clue how anything works. "It has always been that way" just doesn't cut it.

It sounds like Broome blaming MPERS for the BRPD not having enough officers wanting to be shot in north BR. It is certainly not the mayor throwing the BRPD under the bus and rallying [b]against[/b law enforcement....... Maybe she can refer to the wisdom of Gravy to solve this mystery.....

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If a retirement system allowed overtime to be considered for the member's average compensation, everyone would work a shitton of overtime in order to inflate their wages and increase their retirement.

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Right, and that's basically the issue with BRPD and MPERS. Here's the way I understand it (some of the fine details may be a little off, but I believe the general outline is correct):

Employees retirement is based on their highest earning 36 consecutive months. Employees can draw from the retirement system after 10 years at age 55, or after 30 years at any age. They get approximately 3% per year of service, so a 10 year retirement pays out 30% pay and a 30+ year basically pays full salary from their 3 highest earning years. So if they work 30 years and their final year was $80,000 but years 25-28 was an average of $95,000 per year, the retirement rate is based on that highest 3 year average.

Prior to 2000, BRPD's retirement system (CPERS) allowed overtime pay to factor into the 3 highest years calculation. Predictably, many employees close to retirement work as much overtime as possible to boost their retirement rate since obviously 3 years at lieutenant or captain pay + lieutenant/captain overtime rate + many hours of overtime per year = inflated retirement figure.

In 2000 BRPD swapped to the state-wide MPERS system, probably in part due to the looming insolvency of the CPERS system created by what I've described in the previous paragraph (inflated retirement figures). Employees already vested in the old CPERS system were grandfathered in under the old CPERS rules and the rest were supposed to come in under the MPERS rules.

Supposedly BRPD had a "gentlemen's agreement" - whatever the frick that's supposed to mean - with MPERS that would allow employees hired AFTER 2000 (or maybe before but not yet vested in the old system?) to have alleged "mandatory overtime" still factor into their retirement calculations. Court appearances, call-outs, being forced to stay late, working Alton Sterling protests, hurricane overtime and so on - the overtime money paid to officers for hours the officers are forced to work. That's a good thing if you ask me, but the problem becomes: who determines what is "mandatory" overtime and what isn't? MPERS has to take BRPD's accounting at face value and just accept whatever overtime-inflated retirement figures they're given? That's too susceptible to abuse and not sustainable.

So now 18 years later the shite is going to have to hit the fan. Up until now, the vast majority of retirees were grandfathered in under the old rules anyway. But pretty soon more and more retirees will be people hired under the new rules but the department has been trying to let them clandestinely operate under the old rules. Mind you, this isn't really the officers fault at all. 10% of their pay is sent to MPERS no matter what. Ultimately they've probably just gotten fricked out of 10% of their overtime pay that BRPD was sending MPERS instead of paying to the officer, knowing that the officer's MPERS account will eventually not pay the officer extra based on that overtime money per the post-2000 rules, probably because they needed to inject that extra money into the system to pay the inflated retirement figures from the old-rules people.

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don't think they should have been including overtime in the retirement factor since the beginning, but it sounds like they are trying to change it back dated to 2000. Sucks if they were promised it, but did they get a contract/document actually saying that?

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I doubt it, they're police officers and they typically aren't involved in salary negotiations since it's usually a tier system where everyone in that tier(rank) makes the same base pay. It would have mostly likely been a verbal or maybe even in their benefits package paperwork regarding this.

Louisiana

How can you hold officers to a higher standard if you won’t pay them? Cutting all these benefits are just going to make the good cops quit.