Court Rules Disabled Missouri Firefighter Entitled to Reduced Benefits
A Jasper County Circuit Court has ruled that a disabled Missouri firefighter is entitled to a pension that is only one-third of his pre-injury income.
Joplin firefighter Tom Robertson was forced to leave the fire department in January 2011 due to a work-related lung problem. At the time he had 15 years and 11 months of service, short of the required 20 years minimum for a retirement.
His disability rating was 37.5 percent, which should have left him with monthly payments of approximately $1,900 per month. However, the Police and Firefighters Pension Fund and the City of Joplin reduced the payment to $1400 per month, citing a provision that provided for a reduction for each year of service less than 20. Robertson sued challenging the reduction calculation.
Circuit Court Judge David Mouton initially ruled that Robertson’s monthly payment should be raised to $1,931.74, up from $1,448.80. The judge also awarded Robertson $10,978.43 in back pay and interest. However, the city appealed to the Missouri Court of Appeals who reversed and returned the case to Judge Mouton for further consideration.
At trial, the city expressed a concern that it and the pension fund could be bankrupted if the court ruled against it and multiple police officers or firefighters were injured or killed on the job. Following the ruling, Robertson told the Joplin Globe that firefighters now needed to purchase their own disability insurance to ensure they can provide for their families.
WEEKEND RANT: The city’s bankruptcy argument raises an interesting question, one I thought had been answered nearly a century ago when workers comp laws were first enacted: If firefighters are killed or injured serving their community, should the prospect of bankruptcy be shouldered by the firefighters and their families, or by the community they serve?
What kind of person would suggest that the financial burden of a work related injury should fall upon an injured firefighter and their family?
“What kind of person would suggest that the financial burden of a work related injury should fall upon an injured firefighter and their family?”
That’s easy.
Today’s politicians, who want a government “small enough to drown in a bathtub” (while still controlling what women can and cannot do with their own bodies, and dictating who someone can marry), the kind who steal from the pension fun– err, excuse me, the kind who transfer funding to other critical expenditures like additional Deputy Undersecretaries in Charge of Paper Clips, and who then bitch that the city will be bankrupted if they pay a fair compensation to those killed or maimed in the pursuit of public safety.
Who would do it?
LePage, Trump, Snyder, Scott, Walker, Ryan, O’Connell, Cruz, Rubio, Collins, Bachmann, Ernst, and just about any other pol with an “R” after his/her name.
Andrew – there’s an awful lot of people with “D”s after their names that are guilty of the exact same Scrooge-like mindset…. no compassion or empathy… except of course for issues that align with their narrative.
Point of order! While I am sure you may know an awful lot of people with “D” after their name who are just as guilty, when the prior post include specific names associated with attacks on public unions and the protections afforded by workers compensation, just stating that there are “people with ‘D’s” sounds a lot like shouting “they do it to!” without backing up the claim.
No Trumping the comments! 🙂
Reilly – not sure I follow what you are trying to say – but let me be crystal clear about what I was saying to my friend Andrew: The folks who stole the pensions of public employees here in RI – by and large – were democrats. They budgeted money each year for pensions they agreed to, spent some of the money on other things, failed to make the required pension contributions, created enormous liabilities for taxpayers through underfunded pensions – and then successfully blamed public employees without ever taking responsibility for their role in what has happened. I use the term stole because if a private sector employer had done what these crooks did, it would have been a federal crime. Somehow Congress granted an exception under ERISA for elected officials who fail to deposit promised pension contributions. You want the names… Google them youself. Its all public record. Start with Matt Taibbi’s piece in Rolling Stone Magazine “Looting The Pension Funds.”
While you are doing that take a look at the firefighter unions that are currently under attack in RI… and tell me what political party are the elected officials who are attacking them members of?
Curt
Under funding the pensions.
You can start with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christy.
Thanks Mike… and that was my point… both sides are attacking public employees…
Hi Curt
I’ve followed Chris Christy and his Public Pension statements.
Essentially:
First: “the Public Employee fund is $2.2 Billion Under funded and benefits have to be cut”.
Second: “the next year he under funds it again by $2.2 Billion Dollars for a total of $4.4 Billion dollars plus and again says that the Pension Plan is going ‘broke'”
With the City of Vallejo, California and its so-called “Bankruptcy”, it was an attempt at “Union Busting”.
(As with the Cities of San Jose, San Bernardino and San Diego. And San Diego, still does not have a retirement plan for its new firefighter hires as it has with its new Police Officer hires)
The City of vallejo hired a City manager, who in the end went crying to the Cal PERS Retirement system saying he was not being paid his 90% of his $300,00 plus dollar salary.
They came back and told him, he was paid about $230,000 dollars, the remainder of his payments were in “Perks” and take the 90 percent of the $230,000 dollars or leave it.
The City of Stockton, Calif., got into trouble when the city siphoned off about $20 million dollars in scheduled pension payments for all of its employees and made some bad “investments” such as a sports stadium and re building its water front marina.
And then got hit by the recession of 2008.
In most if not all of these cases of “so-called’ bankruptcies
I see the effects of the:
American Legislative Exchange Council or “ALEC”, which has brought “Open Carry” laws in to numerous states.