Scott administration acknowledges pension reform too hot for election year

The Associated Press is reporting that there will be nothing about pension reform in Governor Rick Scott’s budget, to be unveiled Wednesday.

The AP calls the halt to such reform “remarkable,” in that it comes after the governor came out guns blazing earlier this year with a call to shut down the Florida retirement system to new employees and make all public employees contribute 5 percent of their salary to cover pension costs.

As with several other of his ambitious goals, however, his own GOP-led legislature scaled down the proposal, settling for current public employee unions to contribute 3 percent of their salaries to their pension. And that plan is now being challenged in the courts.

Although public employees have been paying into their own retirement plans in most states, that had never happened in Florida. Those employees, already feeling under siege, rebelled, taking to the streets to protest in some of the most sustained activism seen in Florida against Tallahassee in years.

This article appears in Dec 1-7, 2011.