Heading For The Exits: Walker Inspires Exodus Of Public Workers

Limnologist Dick Lathrop might know more about Devil’s Lake than anybody else in the world.

For nearly 20 years, Lathrop has headed efforts to improve water quality in Wisconsin’s best-known state park. One unique project, which involves using a nearly mile-long pipeline to suck weed-boosting phosphorus from the lake bottom, has been followed by water researchers nationwide.

But Lathrop, 62, recently left state service after 33 years with the Department of Natural Resources. He says he started thinking seriously about retirement after the November election of Gov. Scott Walker. Rumors about more cuts at the DNR and Walker’s vow to make the state “open for business” by easing environmental regulations were weighing on his mind, he says.

“I was going to bed at night worrying too much about things,” says Lathrop, whose wife, Kathy Nieber-Lathrop, is a counselor with the Middleton-Cross Plains Area School District. The couple has two teenage daughters.

So shortly before Christmas, Lathrop made the decision to leave state employment. He’d put in more than 30 years, making him qualified for a full pension.  His final day was Dec. 30.

The numbers of public employees who have retired or who have requested information on retiring are up this year in a big way.

In just the first two months of 2011, through Feb. 25, retirements jumped 31 percent compared to the same period last year, from 1,215 in 2010 to 1,595,  according to the state Department of Employee Trust Funds, which oversees the Wisconsin Retirement System.

And the number of people requesting estimates on their retirement benefits during the same period increased 69 percent, from 3,462 in the first two months of 2010 to 5,866 in 2011. Staff with the ETF plug an employee’s estimated date of retirement into a formula to determine what the person’s benefit package would look like if he or she were to retire on that date.

The retirement system includes roughly 265,000 employees: 73 percent are public employees at the local level and 27 percent are state employees. The system administers benefits to union and nonunion workers. City of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County public workers are not included in the state retirement system.

The number of retirements and the interest in retirement among state employees only intensified after Walker introduced his bombshell budget repair bill on Feb. 11. On March 9, Senate Republicans, in a surprise move, approved passage of an amended version of the bill. The Assembly followed suit last Thursday and Walker signed the measure a day later.

The bill, among other things, eliminates nearly all collective bargaining rights for most public employees and requires a 5.8 percent salary contribution to pensions and a 12.6 percent health insurance contribution. It also sets the stage for the state Department of Health Services to revamp Medicaid services without legislative input.

During the week following the governor’s introduction of the bill, ETF received 1,427 requests for retirement estimates and 240 retirement applications, three times more than the amount received in the same week in 2010. The next week the agency received 1,282 requests for retirement estimates and 324 employees turned in their retirement applications.

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