As the state seeks to trim costs and balance its budget, documents show that hundreds of retired state employees are collecting six-figure pensions, with the number growing each year with cost-of-living increases.
The top four retired state employees are now receiving more than $300,000 each in annual pensions.
The statistics also show that, with cost-of-living increases ranging from 2.5% to 6% every year, the payments have been increasing at a steady pace, for them and for thousands of other retirees.
The annual increases will likely boost additional retirees beyond the $300,000 mark soon because there are five additional retirees currently being paid more than $280,000 each, according to statistics from the state comptroller’s office. Overall, 3,244 retirees during the 2023 fiscal year were paid more than $100,000 each, a sharp jump from only 378 retirees who were receiving more than $100,000 in 2010, according to state statistics.
The top recipient, John F. Viega, received nearly $382,000 during the 2023 calendar year. For the first half of this year, he was paid another $193,000. Viega served as chairman of the management department at the University of Connecticut’s school of business for 26 years and spent a total of 37 years teaching at UConn.
The second-highest recipient is Dr. Jack N. Blechner at $374,000 per year. He is a former professor at the UConn Health center in Farmington and the former chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology.
Unlike many workers in the private sector, state employees are not paid at a fixed rate for the rest of their lives; annual COLA increases have a major impact on the payments. Blechner, for example is now receiving more than $157,000 more than he was 19 years ago in 2005.
House Republican leader Vincent Candelora of North Branford said that some of the pensions have gotten too high.
“I think there has to be a conversation about capping them,” Candelora told The Courant in an interview. “There are some individuals that are being enriched by the process, and these pensions are obscene. When you’re going into public service, you should not be getting wealthy out of it. Our whole pension system creates a lot of post-employment wealth that was never contemplated. Whether it’s inflating those pensions for life by working overtime or drafting large salaries, I think it needs to be examined — and we should be capping it.”
He added, “The taxpayers are footing the bill for this. The COLAs are generous. You’re guaranteed a sweetheart deal for life when you work for the state of Connecticut. As a taxpayer, it’s the opposite. You’re stuck paying for it.”
House Speaker Matt Ritter of Hartford agreed that pensions of $300,000 are not sustainable, but he added that numerous reforms have been made that have saved substantial money in recent years.
The first key reform was that new employees hired after July 31, 2017 have a hybrid system of a traditional pension and a 401(k)-style plan. That is the least lucrative of the state retirement plans and far less generous than the Tier 1 plans for employees that was available for those hired before 1984.
Another key reform that was made under then-Gov. Dannel P. Malloy was a change in the long-running practice that state troopers and other employees could work large amounts of overtime in their final three years in order to boost their lifetime pensions. Now, the newly hired employees since 2017 have had their overtime calculated based on a 25-year rolling average, rather than based on the final three years of employment. As such, the employee now needs to work large amounts of overtime throughout an entire career, rather than simply in the final three years.
“I would not expect to see pensions that high going forward because we have revised the pension plans,” Ritter told The Courant.
The total payout in 2023 was a record-setting $2.65 billion that went to more than 59,000 retirees and beneficiaries as numerous families are reliant on the payments. The average pension was $44,378.
The state retirement system does not include some of the highest paid employees in higher education because they are often in a separate pension system operated by the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association College Retirement Equities Fund, known as TIAA-CREF.
The employee who has received the most money for the first half of 2024 — at $322,766 — is Joseph Schmid, a retired worker for the Department of Developmental Services, according to public records.
But the total in the records includes nearly $300,000 in retroactive payments from his disability pension, meaning that the lump sum will not be ongoing. His application for a “service-connected disability retirement” was denied in December 2022, “but the Medical Examining Board stated that it would look favorably upon an application for a non-services connected disability,” according to the state comptroller’s office, which oversees pensions.
Schmid was later granted a “non-service-connected disability retirement” by the medical board earlier this year and became entitled to retroactive payments.
After the medical board found that his disability dated back to July 2018, he became eligible for back pay for more than five years. As such, Schmid was awarded a retroactive payment of $298,345.11 that stretched until Jan. 31, 2024 and was paid this year, according to the comptroller.
Schmid’s ongoing base pension benefit, including COLAs, is about $58,000 per year.
In a similar way, state Sen. Paul Cicarella received $412,000 in 2022, making him the top-paid state employee for pensions. The total included retroactive payments for years when his payments had stopped because the Medical Examining Board said he was not permanently disabled.
Cicarella’s situation is part of a 16-year odyssey dating back to Dec. 6, 2008, when he was the first prison guard on the scene at the Hartford jail when two inmates were fighting in a dormitory setting near the end of the shift. Cicarella was injured while trying to break up the fight, and that turned out to be the last day that he ever worked for the state corrections department.
While some of the pensions are high, Ritter says that employees deserve pensions for working dangerous jobs such as state troopers and prison guards.
“In many cases, people are working jobs that are very difficult, very challenging, and in some cases, threaten their lives,” Ritter said. “At the end of the day, there are many jobs in state government where a pension is a requirement to attract workers to do a certain job.”
He noted that a 26-year-old state transportation department worker was recently killed when struck on Interstate 91 by a driver who was charged with drunken driving. In addition, a state trooper was struck and killed on the side of Interstate 84 in Southington by an impaired driver as the trooper was making a traffic stop.
While noting that pensions are necessary, Ritter understands the broader fiscal implications.
“But I also respect the argument that a pension of $300,000 is not sustainable, and the state cannot afford that,” he said.
In addition to the pension reforms of 2017, the state has also poured nearly $8 billion into the pension funds in recent years due to surpluses in the state budget. That represents a major turnaround for a state that underfunded the pensions for decades under various governors from both political parties. Those failures led to a funding crisis that prompted the reforms enacted in 2017.
“My guess is in 10 years from now, the legislature in Connecticut will say ‘Our pension fund is one of the top in the country,”’ Ritter said. “If we continue on this path — we’ve been in the bottom five forever — I would fully expect us to be in the top half of fully funded pension plans. I really do believe that. We’ve made significant progress. We’ve made a dent, but we still have a ways to go.”