The Merger Study - Is it any use?
- By Jerry Taylor
- Published 10/14/2011
Jerry Taylor
Retired Seattle Police and President of the RSPOA.
Jerry founded LEOFF1.Net in 2000 and is the editor of the site.
The second merger study meeting will be conducted on Monday, October 17th in the Bellevue City Hall. This meeting, in contrast with the first, appears to be much more carefully structured. I suspect that is because the OSA and DRS realized that the unstructured Town Hall format did not work well.
So, they will present a bit of a dog and pony show with a nice slide show presentation telling us all about what they are doing while insisting they are not trying to create a blueprint for merger or to make any judgements about whether or not it is even a good idea.
They have provided some documentation but we have yet to see how the merger concept might shake out financially. And, of course, the legal opinion dealing with the impact of Washington State law and case law on the concept is still unavailable. The LEOFF 2 Board has such a report but refuses to release it.
At least we do have the Ice Miller legal opinion dealing with Federal issues. If anything, that report indicates that it would be a very complicated thing to merge the two plans. Why anyone continues to push for this is beyond me.
The special session of the legislature has to find some way to close a $4 billion budge gap, so we can expect they will go after pension contributions again and that will lead to another merger proposal. At least we are finding a number of influential legislators who do not appear to be seriously interested in the idea of a merger.
Stay tuned. We will have a more detailed report Monday evening.
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2 Responses to "The Merger Study - Is it any use?" 
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said this on 15 Oct 2011 10:33:43 AM PST
Jerry; please keep us active in the fray. We certainly need to educate the legislators of the negative impact of any legislation that the LEOFF 2 Board attempts to pass... C.O.R.P.S.E. Pres.for Life.
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said this on 17 Oct 2011 7:56:19 AM PST
I'm sure that all of us living out of state want to be at tonight's meeting if we could. I certainly would. I distrust their motives and fail to see why a functional retirement fund with a surplus should be merged and that surplus subsequently placed in peril. This is nothing more than a blatant effort to raid the LEOFF I coffers regardless of what rationale they offer tonight. Thanks for staying on top of this.
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