I'll concede right off. When it comes to my worth as a valued employee, I ain't no Larry Feldman.
If I retired and offered to come back for $1 a year, my bosses would figure that was just a negotiating point.
They'd fire back a counteroffer of 25 cents.
Feldman, an admired and popular principal at the Devon Aire K-8 Center in Kendall, didn't even fare that well.
The Miami-Dade School District flat-out rejected his offer to postpone retirement for one more year and forgo $119,999 of his $120,000 salary. Feldman offered to brave another school year transforming young desperados into learned citizens for nothing more than a buck and his benefits.
But the school district has a new policy to rid itself of costly double-dipping pensioners. Feldman is just collateral damage.
He essentially retired five years ago under the deferred pension (DROP) plan. Public employees enrolled in the state pension plan can officially retire but remain on the job, drawing salaries for another five years.
Meanwhile, the workers' pension payments go into saving accounts. But at the end of five years, the jig's up. The retiree is supposed to take his nest egg and go fishing. Except, this being Florida, there's a tiny loophole -- just big enough for 8,000 employees.
$300 MILLION LOOPHOLE
Back in 2001, as the legislative session drew to a close, a barely noticed amendment was tacked onto a piece of legislation that allowed DROP retirees to work their five years, take 30 days off and go right back onto the public payroll.
The law was crafted to allow a few state legislators to go doubledipping into the pension fund. But their loophole had $300 million worth of unforeseen consequences.
An investigative report by the St. Petersburg Times in February counted 8,000 ''retired'' public employees collecting both a pension and a salary, including 131 employees collecting two state pensions -- triple dippers. Unretired retirees rake in $300 million a year in state pension payments.
The newspaper found that in the Florida Department of Corrections alone, 200 workers, many of them in the upper echelons, collected a cumulative $4 million in retirement checks annually along with $11.6 million in salaries.
Elected officials, of course, are double dipping like crazy. More than 200 politicians enrolled in the DROP plan, retired, quietly waited 30 days and went right back on the public payroll.
Schools, at least, have had valid reasons, amid a teacher shortage and a loss of veteran educators, for rehiring DROP retirees. (We're not quite suffering the same critical shortage of elected officials.)
DADE LEADS THE STATE
The St. Pete Times reported that Miami-Dade schools led other school districts with 835 double dippers and 27 triple-dippers on its payroll.
All that experience doesn't come cheap. In a brutal budget year, Miami-Dade schools figured they could save $13.9 million by enforcing a five-year-and-get-out plan for retired educators (except for the neediest schools).
The district said no more double dipping -- a sensible policy that ought to be extended into state law.
But the Feldman case makes the district administrators look as dimly intransigent as the military bureaucracy in Catch-22.
Using my handy calculator, when I double Larry Feldman's proposed $1 salary, it doesn't come to $120,000.
That's not double dipping. That's $119,999 worth of altruism.
