Let’s get this straight: The guy Deval Patrick has hired for $150,000 a year to help the state spend the federal stimulus money intended to help halt an economic slide set in motion by unbridled Wall Street greed is a poster child for the sort of legal looting of the state treasury that represents the Beacon Hill greed Patrick decried when he campaigned for office as a different kind of political leader.
If Patrick didn’t know ahead of time that Jeffrey Simon, the developer he tapped to oversee distribution of more than $1 billion in federal stimulus spending, worked the system to start collecting a hefty state pension while still in his 40s, the news of this, reported in today’s Boston Globe, should be enough for Patrick to send Simon on his way. If Patrick knew of Simon’s pension grab and still thought he was the right man for the job, the governor’s incessant call for citizens — and the media — to put down their cynicism starts to look a bit, well, cynical.
The Globe reports that the 58-year-old Simon was fired in 1995 from a position at the Massachusetts Government Land Bank, and then began collecting a pension of $29,000 to $32,000 a year. Simon tapped an obscure, but lucrative, provision of state law that allows those with at least 20 years of government service to begin collecting pension benefits if they were fired or their position was eliminated. These so-called “termination pensions,” have been the subject of controversy for years. As CommonWealth has reported here, here, and here, the provision has been ripe for abuse and its public policy rationale is highly questionable.
That public-sector employees have availed themselves of this generous pension perk may be understandable. But Simon appears to have taken things a good deal farther than that. In order for him to meet the 20-year qualifying standard for the early pension, the Globe says Simon sought to include in the calculation five years he spent as a $150-a-year member of the Ipswich School Committee. (And some poor saps probably thought such service was all about giving back to the community.) When Simon’s claim was initially refused, he successfully appealed to a state administrative judge. He has collected more than $400,000 from the state while working through his 40s and 50s as a private developer. Only two days ago, the Globe reported on a similar gaming of the system by a former Malden state senator.
This seems to be exactly the kind of greedy run on the public coffers that Patrick should be working hard to end through reforms to the pension system. Simon’s pension grab may be legal. But keeping him in charge of overseeing the spending of hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money will send a pretty strong — and discouraging — message about Patrick’s commitment to changing the way business gets done on Beacon Hill.
