Phoenix Fails to Rein In Pension Spiking
City council can't agree on policy
After nearly three hours of contentious debate, Phoenix city leaders were so divided over how to tackle pension "spiking" on Tuesday that they ended up doing nothing at all.
They walked into the City Council chambers prepared to make changes, but after splintering into three ideological factions, voted 5-4 against a plan to combat spiking, generally seen as the artificial inflation of a city employee's income to boost his or her retirement benefit.
Several high-profile cases have come to light, pushing the effort to eliminate pension boosting to the forefront of the council's agenda.
Former Phoenix City Manager David Cavazos, who retired last week to lead another city, was able to apply unused sick pay and other perks to spike his pension to an estimated $235,863, the second-largest retirement benefit in city history.
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Duh. Switch from defined benefit to defined contribution.
I will never get used to how politicians spend so much effort trying to recreate results that any market would produce in seconds.