These lawmakers will vote on state pensions while collecting one. Is it a conflict?

At least a third of Rhode Island's $19,036.76-a-year part-time lawmakers have a personal stake – or a potential future stake – in scaling back the 2011 pension reforms that were meant to save taxpayers billions.

That includes 14 current state lawmakers already collecting pensions – ranging from $4,816 to $91,839 a year – from the state-run retirement system covering state workers, public school teachers and municipal employees.

Depending on what the latest pension-study group recommends, and what the General Assembly decides to do during the 2024 legislative session (which is also an election year), these lawmakers could vote to raise their own benefits by reinstating 3% annual cost-of-living adjustments, or some variation.

Another 25 state lawmakers have credit toward a future state pension ranging from just a few months to 32½ years. Others still are the children or spouses of current, or potentially future, state pensioners.

A few examples of lawmakers collecting state pensions

Case in point: Senate Majority Whip Valarie Lawson, an East Providence Democrat who doubles as president of one of the state's two teachers unions, the National Education Association of Rhode Island.

At 57, Lawson is still too young to collect a pension. But as a retired East Providence school teacher, with 32½ years of credit in the state retirement system, she is in line for a potential $46,992 pension beginning in summer 2025.

Several others in leadership are already collecting pensions, including:

• Senate President Pro Tempore Hanna Gallo, $25,940.28.

• House Education Committee Chairman Joseph McNamara, $70,933.68.

• House Oversight Committee Chairwoman Patricia Serpa, $38,187.24.

All are retired teachers, support staff or, in McNamara's case, the director of the Pawtucket School Department’s Alternative Learning Program.

Serpa, 75, has been all over social media lamenting her vote in 2011 for the pension overhaul that effectively froze the pensions of thousands of retirees, including her own.

"Make no mistake about it: this was a disaster extraordinaire for everyone in the past, present and future," Serpa said recently on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.

"It’s my sincere hope that commission members will consider the economic conditions of 2011 vs. those of 2023. Retirees with no Social Security or other income besides their pension are truly suffering. We need to help our own this time around," wrote Serpa, who retired as a West Warwick teacher in 1998.

She's one of the lucky ones.

Her school district in West Warwick was one of the many that paid into Social Security on behalf of its teachers, so she gets her $3,182-a-month state pension, roughly $2,000 a month from her late husband's pension as a retired Providence firefighter, plus Social Security, which pays "more than my pension."

"I'm OK financially," she says. "I'm not crying for me, but I obviously can't take myself out of the equation."

She promises to introduce legislation next year to require every city and town and every school district to pay into Social Security for their employees. And that's just the beginning.

Depending on what the Pension Advisory Group recommends, Serpa – and the other pensioners – could find themselves in a dilemma: Should they, or should they not, vote to increase their own benefits?

A conflict of interest?

Serpa recognizes that she could benefit from any vote she takes to walk back the 2011 pension cuts, but says, "It goes both ways."

"You know what?" she asks rhetorically. "When I took the vote in 2011, I voted to hurt myself financially and I did it with the purest of intentions. I bought everything the then-general treasurer said lock, stock and barrel. ... I wanted to make sure there would be money in that retirement system for teachers and state workers who would need it long after I was gone."

Doubting now what she was told, she says: "Unfortunately I was one of the pigs led to slaughter. We were outgunned and outnumbered by the then-general treasurer's army of actuaries and retirement specialists."

Lawson would not comment directly on how she intends to deal with pension-related discussions and votes as a union leader and a future pensioner. Before any potential pension vote, Senate spokesman Greg Pare said the Senate's legal counsel will provide guidance.

But John Marion, executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island, thinks they should go a step further.

"The last time the General Assembly seriously considered the issue of pension changes, legislators were largely exempt from the Code of Ethics because of a loophole created by a 2009 Rhode Island Supreme Court decision," he said. "With that loophole closed by a 2016 constitutional amendment, legislators are now fully subject to the state's conflict of interest laws."

Any legislator in one of "the affected pension systems should be seeking guidance from the Ethics Commission before working on any possible changes. If they don't ... [they] are opening themselves up to possible ethics complaints," he said.

But House Majority Leader Christopher Blazejewski does not see a problem, based on the Ethics Commission's past stance on lawmakers voting in their own self-interest, as long as others benefit, too.

His wife, Ami M. Gada, is many years from retirement from teaching history to high schoolers in Johnston, but how much she and others like her get at that point – and the age at which they are allowed to retire – is very much in play.

As he reads the Ethics Commission's "class exception," there's no problem voting, "as long as it impacts everyone in the exact same way," and in this case, "tens of thousands of people."

"We're a part-time legislature, and that's why I believe when the Ethics Commission was creating the rules, they knew that they had to have ... something like a 'class exception.'" Blazejewski said.

"We have to look at the whole system. We need to make sure that the system is there for people who are just starting out their careers, people in the middle of their careers, people who are at the end of their careers."

What exactly happened in 2011?

Understanding what is currently up for debate requires an understanding of what happened in 2011.

Convinced that the skyrocketing cost of Rhode Island's famously generous pensions was unsustainable, Rhode Island's overwhelmingly Democratic legislators did the unimaginable: They approved a package of dramatic pension cuts aimed at saving taxpayers $4 billion over the next two decades.

The 2011 law that then-General Treasurer and current U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo crafted -– and state lawmakers approved – required current-day workers to work years longer for smaller pensions.

The new pension law also suspended the guaranteed yearly COLAs that Rhode Island's retired teachers and government employees had been promised until the fund is more financially secure, sometime around 2031, while providing small, interim increases.

The aim: to keep the taxpayer cost of the severely underfunded system from doubling from $377 million in 2012 to a projected $689 million a year later, and to $951 million by 2020.

In the years since, Rhode Island's infuriated retirees have gotten some small increases, but they have also grown increasingly vocal in their demands on legislators to reinstate annual COLAs.

In response to their demands – and worker shortages in critical places in state government – legislative leaders called for the fresh look, now underway, into the "unintended consequences" of the 2011 pension overhaul on both past and present workers, including "the ability of the state to attract and retain a stable workforce."

More: 'I cannot afford to retire': State retirees will make their case for pension COLAs

Which current state lawmakers currently get pensions?

Which lawmakers get a pension from the state-run retirement system?

In the Senate, besides Gallo, retirees already collecting pensions from the state-run system include:

• John P. Burke, retired from IT at the University of Rhode Island, with a $60,781 pension.

• Frank Ciccone, the retired head of the state's Judicial Records Center, with a $75,126 pension.

• Anthony DeLuca, who retired after 10 years as an East Greenwich firefighter, with a $15,568 disability pension.

• David Tikoian, a retired state police trooper, with a $91,844 pension.

In the House, in addition to McNamara and Serpa, they include:

• Edward Cardillo, $9,850

• Susan Donovan, $61,083

• Arthur Handy, $4,816

• Mary Duffy Messier, $57,230.16

• Charlene Lima, $48,922

• Patricia Morgan, $8,311

• Sherry Roberts, $7,687

Democrats Donovan, Messier, Serpa, Lima and McNamara and Republican Morgan are former teachers.

Cardillo, D-Johnston, is a retired foreman/mechanic for the Town of Johnston.

Handy, D-Cranston, gets benefits as the widower of the late Patricia "Tish" DiPrete Handy.

Republican Roberts, of West Greenwich, retired after 16 years with the state Department of Children, Youth & Families as a senior typist and then a case-aid technician. She retired on May 21, 2005, with a disability pension, following a collision with an 18-wheeler truck on her way to work.

More: Wildfires in Exeter last spring took Rhode Islanders by surprise. Are we ready for more?

Others in line for a pension when they retire – or reach a qualifying age – include:

• Rep. Nathan Biah, the principal at Dr. Jorge Alvarez High School in Providence (whose wife teaches at another city school).

• Rep. Stephen Casey, who has logged close to 18 years since making the leap from mortgages to firefighting in his 30s.

• Rep. Matt Dawson, who worked more than 20 years as a state prosecutor and chief of the attorney general's Narcotics and Organized Crime Unit and then as a probate judge in East Providence.

• Sen. Elaine Morgan, who is in line to receive a pension when she turns 60 for her late husband Edward "Ted" Morgan's 30-plus years as a social worker for the Department of Human Services.

Are there pensions for being a lawmaker?

For what it's worth: Senate President Dominick Ruggerio is only one current-day lawmaker who has been in the General Assembly long enough to qualify for a legislative pension when he leaves the State House, a perk unavailable to any legislator elected for the first time since 1994.

Voters gave lawmakers elected before 1994 who by then had already spent a minimum of eight years in the General Assembly a choice. They could remain in the pension system, with each year on Smith Hill worth $600 toward a maximum $12,000-a-year pension, or they could collect an inflation-indexed $10,000 yearly salary.

Ruggerio – who has been a legislator since 1981, in the Senate for the last 40 years and before that, two terms in the House – chose to stay in the pension system.

At some point, after Ruggerio had been in the legislature so long that he was no longer accumulating credits toward a legislative pension, someone decided he could start collecting a legislative salary.

It currently pays him $38,073.52 a year. (Leaders make double the $19,036.76 paid to the rank-and-file.)

As of 2021, 158 former legislators or their surviving spouses were getting legislative pensions, including former House Speaker John B. Harwood; former senator and current Elections Board Vice Chairman David Sholes; onetime State House powerhouse and current Narragansett Bay Commission Chairman Vincent Mesolella; current state Rep. Carol McEntee's husband, former Rep. Michael McEntee.

Along with most others in the state-run retirement system, they have gone without COLAs since the pension overhaul law took effect in 2012. (The only exceptions: retirees from communities with pension systems that are already more than 80% funded do receive annual COLAs.)

Lawmakers also collect pensions from cities and towns

Others facing a potential pension vote in 2024 have a pension — or potential pension — from cities and towns that operate independent retirement plans, including the City of Providence.

Put another way, they have nothing to gain or lose from any legislative votes to change the state's retirement rules.

A former councilman, Rep. John Lombardi, had both a city pension and an elected official pension that totaled $24,961 a year the last time The Journal checked, but both pensions have been suspended since he became a Providence Municipal Court judge.

Sen. Ana Quezada gets a $13,061 city pension and Rep. Deborah Fellela of Johnston gets a $19,635-a-year pension, according to information provided by the city.

Others not yet retired have anywhere from three years up to the 37 years in pension credits that Rep. Ray Hull has logged as a Providence police officer.

In his second career working for the Providence Water Supply Board, Tikoian, the retired state police trooper with a $91,000 state pension, is eight years and seven months into his new job.

Other Providence lawmakers have anywhere from months to decades of credit toward pensions from the city.

Those representatives include:

• Grace Diaz, who has eight years and 11 months of credit toward a city pension.

• Scott Slater, 31 years and five months.

• Anthony DeSimone, five years and nine months. (Note: The city initially provided an incorrect count of 16 years and five months.)

• Leonela Felix, five years and eight months.

This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: RI politicians will vote on state pensions overhaul while collecting one