High Cost of Public Pensions in Chicago. CTA execs ride the pension express

The Chicago Sun-Times reports:

The Chicago Transit Authority has spent nearly $94 million over 15 years on a retirement program that has allowed former CTA executives to start collecting lucrative pensions in their late 40s and early 50s while also getting paychecks from other government jobs, a Chicago Sun-Times and Better Government Association investigation has found.

Nearly 500 former transit executives or their survivors collected a total of more than $7 million from the “CTA supplemental retirement plan” in 2014, the most recent year for which records were available.

Originally intended to supplement CTA executives’ regular pensions with modest additional benefits, the CTA board — then chaired by Carole L. Brown, who’s now the chief financial officer in Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration — changed the supplemental plan in 2008 to allow dozens of those employees to retire early.

Another 37 people received pension payments in 2014 of between $50,000 and $100,000 apiece. They include Lynn Sapyta, who retired at 53 and went on to work for five years for the College of DuPage before being fired from her $159,000-a-year job along with other school administrators over allegations of financial mismanagement.

Seventy percent of the supplemental retirees — 341 — were paid less than $10,000 each, in line with the plan’s original intent of providing them with modest payments on top of their regular CTA pensions. Most of their pension income came from the Retirement Plan for CTA Employees, the main pension fund for transit workers, into which the CTA has paid nearly $1.8 billion over 15 years.

Government workers sure are expensive.