Baltimore City Council Covers Their Six
City Council votes to amend pension requirements days before voters vote on term limits
If you are as cynical about the motivations of politicians as I am, you will not be surprised about this:
A bill that would decrease from 12 to eight the number of years Baltimore elected officials would need to earn a pension was advanced by a Baltimore City Council committee Thursday despite a warning from city retirement officials that costs could escalate.
The 5-to-2 vote was made during a hastily scheduled hearing on the bill introduced to the City Council last week by Council President Nick Mosby.
What’s even better about this bill is that the bill will only take effect if voters adopt Question K, the term limits bill that would set term limits for city elected officials to…..eight years.
In all my years of covering politics, I’m not sure I’ve ever see something so nakedly self-serving as this. City Council members, knowing that they may be term-limited in the very near future if Question K passes, decided that it was necessary right now to amend the pension requirements with little warning and little oversight.
Then there is this nugget from Councilman Robert Stokes:
Stokes defended the legislation, saying there will be no incentive for young people to seek office if they would be term limited out of a pension. Council’s hand was forced by the term limit charter amendment, he said.
“We’re only doing this to secure people’s pensions,” he said. “Everybody when they work somewhere, they want to leave with a pension.”
There are lots of people in Baltimore who would like to leave their job with a pension. But they can’t get a job, much less one with a pension, because Baltimore City elected officials are too busy dickering around protecting their precious pensions first and foremost.
You know that in Baltimore City, the elected Democrats feather their own nests before worrying about anybody else.
What’s even more ridiculous is that, according to the language of the Question K proposal, City Council members would still have a chance to earn twelve years of service. The question is phrased so that “None of these elected officials shall hold office for more than eight (8) years during any 12-year period.” That means that a City Council member could serve two terms, sit out a term, and run again. By the logic of Stokes and other City Council members, this is a solution in search of a problem.
All of this begs the question as to why Baltimore City elected officials get a pension in the first place. City Council members earn $76,660 in salary in a city where the median per capita income is $32,699 and 20% of people live below the poverty line. You’re telling me that after earning that earning $613,280 over the course of eight years of service on the City Council that they need an additional pension paid for by the city?
Do you know how long regular Baltimore City employees have to work to earn a full retirement? 30 years.
It’s both absurd and typical that the Baltimore City Council is trying to rush this plan through, days before an election in which term limits may become a reality. But what this should do is get a motivated concerned citizen in Baltimore City to introduce a Charter Amendment to ban pensions for city elected officials.