Last updated on 04/20/2014
4/18/2014: Ted Sickinger has the story in the Oregonian:
Aliotti is 59 years old. If he lives another 26.5 years, as PERS’ actuarial tables predict, the state pension system will pay him about $6.6 million in retirement, plus cost of living increases.
Where will that $6.6M come from? As Sickinger explained in his earlier story below, these payouts are so high because UO pulled a scam with how it treated the Nike money that is part of the coach’s compensation. So UO and OUS didn’t pay enough into PERS for to cover these payouts, and now the rest of the money will have to come by diverting payments from current UO/OUS employees.
And then the university will claim that, when they count the cost of faculty benefits, faculty are overpaid. Got it?
4/10/2012: Bellotti, Frohnmayer top PERS payouts
It took a long legal struggle, but the Oregonian has been getting data on PERS payouts from the state, bit by bit. The Ted Sickinger story on how Mike Bellotti managed to pull off his $500K pension scam is pretty amazing. It will cost taxpayers $5 million.
And here’s a bit on how Bellotti took UO for another $2.3 million, plus this. He tried to get $7 million. And now the curious/jealous/outraged/smug can now check up on their friends and colleagues retirement benefits on the Oregonian website:
Dog points something out important
While the Oregonian Table does continue most of the relevant information they have left out, possible because they didn’t think about it or were legally barred from it, is the amount of cashed out sick leave (for University employees).
A case in point.
If you look up Tomlin and try to reproduce his
stated monthly benefit from using the full formula you will fall about $2000 short and
scratch your head. This is because PERS likely cashed out 32 years of accumulated sick leave
at 72 – 96 hours per year (depends on how much
summer salary was earned)
In round numbers you get about 1$ a month more
in benefit for every 1 hour of sick leave.
If your concerned about PERS “reform” the biggest concern should be whether or not your
sick leave will continue to count as cash.
To top off his $113,989 PERS retirement, Russ Tomlin is getting paid $185,640 at a 0.99 FTE from his Johnson Hall job. How does that work? Tomlin is in charge of the 600 hours retirement program for faculty, but his own deal seems to be far sweeter. Why?
He is probably only working from Jan-June this year, which would keep him under the PERS max hours if he doesn’t work for the U of O for the rest of the year. Tomlin was obviously very badly paid as a professor – an indication of his quality as an academic – since otherwise his PERS would be much higher, given his administrative salary the last decade or so.