Variety of PERS reform bills introduced in Nevada Legislature

CARSON CITY — New measures seeking reforms to Nevada’s public employee pension system have been introduced at the Nevada Legislature, including a measure that would prohibit the purchase of service credits to retire at an earlier age.

Assembly Bill 387, introduced Tuesday by Minority Leader Marilyn Kirkpatrick, D-North Las Vegas, would still allow public employees to purchase up to five years of retirement credits. But the purchased time could not be used to calculate an earlier retirement date, she said.

The bill would let retirees get a bigger pension of about 2.5 percent per year of service. So buying five years would give a retiree a pension that was 12. 5 percent bigger than it would be otherwise.

The bill would affect new hires as of July 1, 2015.

Current law allows a regular public employee to retire at any age with 30 years of service. An employee with 25 years could purchase an additional five years and retire immediately. Critics call the practice buying “air time.”

Another measure introduced in the Assembly on Monday would set the retirement age for regular sector public employees to the age at which they could retire under Social Security. For police and firefighters, the retirement age would be the Social Security age minus 10 years.

Public employees can now retire at earlier ages depending on when they began working.

Assembly Bill 312 by Assemblyman Glenn Trowbridge, R-Las Vegas, would also require a pension to be calculated using five years of the highest annual earnings instead of three. The change could in some cases result in a lower pension amount for an employee upon retirement.

The changes would take effect for new public employees hired after July 1, 2016.

The two measures are more modest than a proposal from Assemblyman Randy Kirner, R-Reno, to change the public employees retirement system for future hires by switching to a mostly defined-contribution plan. Assembly Bill 190 is now in the Ways and Means Committee because of a large fiscal note.

One other PERS-related measure is not a reform but instead a response to a Nevada Supreme Court decision finding that retirement pensions earned by public employee retirees are public information.

Senate Bill 356, sponsored by Sen. Debbie Smith, D-Sparks, would make the pension information confidential.

PERS officials had maintained that individual retirees’ pensions and other details were confidential, but the Supreme Court in November 2013 ruled otherwise in response to a lawsuit by the Reno Gazette-Journal.

Since then the retiree information has been made public and is posted on the Nevada Policy Research Institute’s transparentnevada.com website.

Contact Sean Whaley at swhaley@reviewjournal.com or 775-687-3900. Find him on Twitter: @seanw801.