Kansas legislators amass full-time pensions from part-time jobs

When Kansas lawmakers adjourned early this month, they passed a budget that let the governor sort out the details of where to cut spending.

But they didn’t need to worry about how their pensions would fare.

Legislators get a retirement package as unusual as it is generous, sealed with a taxpayer guarantee.

The one-of-a-kind Kansas pension plan lets representatives and senators sign up for full-time pension benefits while working their part-time elected positions.

“Legislators,” notes an employee benefits sheet explaining the pension plan to new lawmakers, “have a special deal here.”

They get a modest salary for the roughly four months they spend each year in Topeka, but their pensions grow as if the state paid them for a year-round gig.

All told, a salary shy of $15,000 makes a lawmaker eligible for a pension that any other teacher, road worker, prison employee or Kansas bureaucrat could qualify for only if their actual pay ran north of $90,000.

“It’s not fair or appropriate,” said Rebecca Proctor, the executive director of the Kansas Organization of State Employees, a union representing 8,000 public employees.

She was a member of a Kansas Public Employees Retirement System study commission that in 2011 suggested changing the special system for legislators. The Kansas Legislature never acted on that recommendation.

Instead, she said, lawmakers have attempted to shore up KPERS, the state pension system, by increasing contributions required of regular state employees. In addition, some legislators have floated proposals limiting whether those workers could count unused vacation and sick time toward their pension benefits.

“It’s hypocritical,” Proctor said.

To be sure, members of the House and Senate must pay into the system, 6 percent of the supposed salary on which their pensions are calculated. But it’s such a good deal that few pass it up.

Taxpayers typically pay about twice an employee’s contribution toward the pension. So the more legislators sign up for, the more the state must also chip in.

In some ways, Kansas’ oversized pension benefit balances the scale for legislators, who are paid less than those in 41 other states.

(Some states pay flat salaries, others allot money for each day a legislature meets.)

Perhaps only Texas rivals the Sunflower State retirement plan for lawmakers. There, legislators making less than $8,000 a year tie their pension to district judges’ six-figure salaries.

Missouri lawmakers also get an outsized pension plan, although it doesn’t pay as well as the Kansas deal and comes closer to aligning with their salaries.

Many legislators concede the pension is better than what other state workers get. But they contend it makes up for the low wages lawmakers earn while in office.

The Kansas deal has been in place since 1982. Today, 158 retired legislators draw from $880 to $55,999 a year. The average legislative pensioner in Kansas gets $13,109 yearly.

Payouts vary mostly depending on years of service. Lawmakers can increase that figure by paying extra contributions so that time in the military, in the Peace Corps or even for serving on a city council counts toward their pension total.

Again, when a legislator “buys back” those years of pension benefits for time on a county commission or other public service, taxpayers must roughly double what that lawmaker puts into the pension.

But the most distinct thing about the pension for Kansas lawmakers is that it “annualizes” legislators’ part-time wages to create full-time-sized pensions. The National Conference of Legislatures shows no other state offering that windfall.

12-month accounting

Kansas legislators get two forms of salary.

First is their so-called per diem, $88.66 for each day the Legislature is in session. That typically runs slightly less than $8,000 a year.

Second, lawmakers get an “allowance” of about $7,000 a year for the time they’re not convened in Topeka – when most work other jobs – in their districts fielding questions and complaints from constituents. So the salary of a legislator runs about $15,000 a year.

Lawmakers also get $140 for each day they’re in session to cover lodging, meals and other living expenses in Topeka. (Any legislator who lives within 50 miles of the Statehouse must pay taxes on that money.)

The pension plan then annualizes each of those payments, as if they were all salary and as if the money were earned a full 12 months.

“If you could annualize what teachers get paid for nine months, they could kick up their retirement a considerable amount,” said Ernie Claudel, a former teacher and co-chairman of the Kansas Coalition of Public retirees. “But they don’t have that choice.”

No other participants in the KPERS pension system have that choice.

“It doesn’t pass the smell test,” said Edward Zelinsky, a pension expert at Cardozo Law School in New York City. “Even if the absolute dollars are low” – legislators make up a tiny percentage of the 290,000 workers enrolled in KPERS – “this is a signal to a deeper kind of problem that the system is stacked. … If it weren’t wrong, why would they have to make it so obscure?”

Interviews with those who served in the governorship, the state Senate presidency and as speakers of the House when the pension-boosting system sprang to life provide few specifics of how it was born. None recalls the exact legislative wrangling over the issue.

Rather, they remember long-standing efforts by lawmakers wanting to boost their pay – but knowing that voting yourself a raise could doom re-election. Many believed a job that paid modestly but consumed several months every year was largely limiting the Legislature to people who were retired or independently wealthy.

John Carlin, a legislative leader in the late 1970s before an eight-year run as governor that started in 1979, didn’t recall how the annualization took shape. But the Democrat remembers regular efforts to boost pension benefits, sometimes in legislative amendments written to benefit a single lawmaker.

“You’d find some legislator had gone to the committee that handled it, put in a proviso that raised the benefits for an individual,” he said, by setting up arcanely narrow definitions of who would be eligible. Such efforts almost always failed.

But he saw those efforts as symptomatic of a push to raise lawmaker compensation, and how politically toxic that could prove.

Audrey Langworthy, who served in the Legislature for 16 years beginning in the 1980s, said she has no qualms about the pension she gets today.

“I considered it a full-time job” that paid poorly, the former lawmaker from Prairie Village said. “I don’t feel like I am raking in too big of a pension, because I feel like I worked pretty hard.”

This story was originally published May 29, 2016 at 5:26 PM with the headline "Kansas legislators amass full-time pensions from part-time jobs."