Jacksonville Mayor Alvin Brown says he’s not quite sure why the Fraternal Order of Police says they are not the unit to talk pension reform, but the people they’re pointing to say it’s black and white.
“The settlement agreement sets out the minimum benefits that police officers and firefighters can earn,” says Police and Fire Pension Fund Administrator and Executive Director John Keane.
He says in 1991, the city of Jacksonville and the pension board agreed, in a lawsuit settlement, on how to set the framework for the administration of the fund. That measure was later approved by city council and signed in to law. It has been amended numerous times, and the current proposal hammered out under then-Mayor John Delaney is supposed to stand until 2030.
According to Keane, that law as interpreted means the pension board needs to be the one any pension reform is taken to, but that has not been the case so far.
“We were surprised to see the retirement proposal that was unveiled yesterday, and quite frankly I was shocked to see the one that came out today,” Keane says.
Brown met with the Fraternal Order of Police local yesterday to present his proposed pension changes, and today he handed changes to AFSCME local, the union which represents city workers. Keane did not like how some parts of the proposals compared from one agency to the other, but said he was looking more in to that as more details came out. Through the rest of this week he will also meet with the Jacksonville Association of Firefighters and the Jacksonville Supervisor's Association.
While AFSCME reps I spoke with say they are the ones to negotiation their share, the FOP says their deal falls on the pension board. Keane agrees.
“It’s a binding agreement- binding on the city, binding on the pension board,” he says.
Keane supports pension reform and says the board wants to play an active role in achieving it. He says over the past five years they have presented different entities, including this Mayor’s office, ideas and proposals for change.
“All of them have been uniformly not enacted,” he says.
Despite that, he is still confident in achieving meaningful change. He says what is laid out in the beginning and who it is brought to always changes as deals move forward, so he expects the board will begin to play an active role soon.
