Melissa Ross
The Jacksonville City Council meets Tuesday, and the entire 19-member body has sponsored a new bill that would repurpose the Better Jacksonville Plan with a half-cent sales tax to pay down the city’s massive unfunded pension liability.
Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry says he’s willing to ask the voters to approve the idea with a referendum.
It will be a heavy lift for Curry, potentially requiring assists not just from voters, but also the Council and his contacts in Tallahassee.
And now, the pushback is under way.
Jacksonville employment attorney Tad Delegal, an expert on pensions who was counsel for the Fraternal Order of Police from 1993-2007, says he has no problem with Curry’s half-cent sales tax proposal.
In fact, he commends the mayor for leading on the issue.
No, the sticking point may be elsewhere: in Curry’s proposal to switch new employees from a defined benefit plan to a 401(k)-style system or defined contribution plan.
Delegal, who was on former Mayor Alvin Brown‘s Pension Task Force, is quick to point out other cities such as Palm Beach tried that route to pay down pension debts but ran into trouble because of high employee turnover.
“They’re having such problems with it now that they’re seeking to repeal it and go to something else. Sixty percent of that police force has less than three years experience. You have people leaving in droves. The problem with a 401(k) system is it doesn’t keep people there for the long term, and you need that in public safety,” he told WJCT.
“In places like West Virginia, Alaska, they’ve seen the turnover, and they’ve gone back to defined plans. You don’t get paid until the end of the benefit, so there’s a disincentive to leaving. It’s to keep you there for the long term. The design of a 401(k) plan is to do what they’ve done in private industry and let people move from job to job. It costs $100,000 to train a new police officer. You don’t need turnover in a police department and when you have it, you’ve got substantial problems. We’ve got concerns about police judgment. I don’t think Jacksonville wants to wake up in five years and realize that the officers making life-and-death decisions are all rookies. We’re setting ourselves up for another crisis.”
Delegal is clearly not an unbiased observer. He has represented unions and speaks for labor. However, as this website has reported, if more union voices join his, their influence on Council members could be telling.
“Everybody’s gotten on this bandwagon over a period of seven days, everybody’s signed off on it. Nobody’s analyzed it. We spent months and months on the task force looking at alternatives. We’re going to wind up paying more, much more, because people will be leaving. This will end up being a financial mess as well as a public safety mess, in a short period of time.
“The problem is, that we’ve had this history of kicking the can down the road, doing things that look good now but cost us later. And it will undoubtedly create us problems in the future with a 401(k) plan.”
