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Friday, February 10, 2012

Maryland Legislature Sponsors Bills To Bailout School Teachers Pension Plan and Shift Cost To Counties

Today - HB-863 and SB-836 were sponsored in the Maryland Legislature to pass-on Pension Cost that were previously provided at the State level down to the Counties.

Basically - these bills will provide requisite authority to require Counties to pay the pension cost for school teachers, librarians, and community college educators. Wicomico County is expected to absorb 3.8 million dollars - (refer to HB-87) - as a result of enactment of this legislation. However - the real sticker shock may come in subsequent years as teachers salaries increase as well as escalation of their associated pension costs. Our preliminary projections show Wicomico County will ultimately have to absorb as much as 10 million dollars per year in additional pension cost by the year 2023 - or in 10 years. We will be publishing this data report in the very near future.

Also, I anticipate that the Democratic side of the legislature will follow-up with sponsoring their own version of the Teachers pension bailout bill - and we'll try and keep our readers posted as that develops.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I believe that teachers are now paying 7% of their salaries towards their pension costs, up from 5%. (Maybe a current teacher could verify that. I am a retired teacher who paid 5%, but I believe it went up later to7%). Perhaps that additional money paid into the fund will keep the costs down for the counties.

Anonymous said...

Since this pension cost was being picked up at the state level I can assume it was being paid for by my state withholding taxes. Now if they shift it to the county level will my state withholding tax percentage go down? If it doesn't then bottom line it's another tax hike by the O'malley administration.

O'Malley keeps on taking.

Anonymous said...

i wonder if ricky has made provision for this. he doesn't have the reputation for planning ahead now does he????

fasten your seatbelts wicomico county as this will be a really rough ride. the only solution is to get ricky out of office and get someone who is honorable, and has the experience needed in the private sector to do the job right.

of course we need to get the dems and rinos off the county council, but that's another story.

Anonymous said...

Email your state rep and tell them NO. This is like someone going back on their word.

If you hire someone to do a job and he says he will do the job and not charge you for the lumber and then you get a bill for the lumber. You can sue.

The state, you can do nothing except take it in the a$$.

Anonymous said...

Since this pension cost was being picked up at the state level I can assume it was being paid for by my state withholding taxes. Now if they shift it to the county level will my state withholding tax percentage go down? If it doesn't then bottom line it's another tax hike by the O'malley administration.