No one likes a double-dip.
That applies to the chip bowl, an economic recession and municipal coffers.
And yet that's what we see happening when local governments accept the retirement of long-standing employees, start printing their pension cheques and then immediately put these same people back on the payroll to help train their successors. The North Shore has seen several recent cases of this with senior bureaucrats and firefighters.
It's fine if someone wants to take their retirement and continue putting their lifetime of skills and expertise to work, and there's no question that we want outgoing civil servants to pass on their hard-earned knowledge for the betterment of the municipality. But this should be something they are paid to do as part of the job, not a service they sell back to their former employer and the taxpayer. This is money that could be saved or better spent elsewhere.
Let's not forget that this is against the spirit of what pensions are meant to do. Rather than provide for a dignified standard of living in retirement, pensions, in these instances, are being used to pad the income of people still active in the workforce. This amounts to an expensive golden handshake at a time when top-heavy public pension systems are at risk of buckling and local governments face unending calls for fiscal restraint.
Our local governments are now facing a glut of senior managers reaching retirement age in the coming years, and there's nothing in the rules against this practice. It's time for bureaucrats and councils to start succession planning now. Let's stop the double-dipping.
