Every day, we rely on some of our most visible public employees–firefighters, police officers, and emergency medical responders–to ensure our safety. We often take for granted that a trained professional will answer our call for help or that a team of brave and dedicated individuals will show up and put out a fire, literal or otherwise. But what happens when there aren’t enough public safety personnel to staff the firehouse or run the police department? What happens when there isn’t someone there to pick up the phone when an emergency strikes?
The Significance of Securing Safety Workers
In the last decade, state and local governments have faced growing challenges in staffing public safety roles. COVID-19, low morale, and inadequate pay and benefits have all been cited as reasons for increased vacancies in public safety departments. However, research from the National Institute on Retirement Security (NIRS) released earlier this summer uncovers the importance of offering secure pensions as a crucial workforce management tool for cities and states looking to recruit and retain police officers, firefighters, and other first responders that Americans rely on every day.
The link between public safety and pensions goes back to the very genesis of defined-benefit retirement plans in America in 1878 when New York City police officers became the first public employees to receive lifetime pension benefits upon retirement. Acknowledging officers’ critical role in protecting homes and businesses, a pension system was essential to care for the men–and now women–in these hazardous duty jobs. Public safety workers endure more dangerous, physically demanding, and mentally taxing jobs than many other public employment positions; ensuring their comfort, dignity, and care in retirement after a career in unyielding public service is paramount. However, when cities and states discovered that alternative retirement plans, like the 401(k), could save them money and place investment and management responsibilities on individual workers, the trend of ditching pension plans for public workers spread like wildfire. But just like a wildfire that can’t be contained, this shift has caused damage to the public safety sector that could take decades to recover.
What’s Keeping Workers in the Line of Fire
The new NIRS study, The Role of Defined Benefit Pensions in Recruiting and Retaining Public Safety Professionals, analyzed a nationally representative collection of 28 police and fire pension plans representing all regions of the country, including state, and large to mid-sized municipal plans. The study found that these pension plans expect 75% or more of current employees to retire from the plan, with 52% of new hires projected to stay until retirement. Another key finding was the average length of service within these public safety plans: police officers typically worked 18 years before retiring, firefighters 20 years, and all public safety workers combined averaged 17.6 years of dedicated service.
More than half of new hires in public safety expect to retire from their jobs–6% predict they will leave their positions due to disability or death, and 42% expect to quit or leave for other reasons. To contrast these numbers to private sector employees, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that workers outside the public safety realm average only 4.1 years in a job before leaving. It’s important to note that firefighters and police officers often reach their length of service requirements long before they are eligible to draw from their pension. An officer who joined at age 27 could reach their service requirement at age 47 but could not draw their pension benefits until age 55 or later. Because of this, many public safety officials seek secondary work after their careers in public service–following decades of physically and mentally grueling, high-risk, dangerous work.
Unsurprisingly, some of our most crucial public employees remain in their careers for the long run when the promise of a secure pension awaits them in retirement. When NIRS surveyed public workers in 2019, they found that 98% of firefighters and 97% of police officers expressed favorable views of defined benefit (DB) pensions. Recruitment and retention have tanked most alarmingly among public safety officials in cities and states where access to DB plans has been stripped from the public sector.
Case Study: Alaska
When lawmakers voted to close Alaska’s public pension systems in 2005, they certainly did not anticipate the consequences that accompanied ransacking the retirement security of its public workforce. Today, Alaska is in crisis mode. Working-age Alaskans in the public sector, including firefighters and police officers, are either leaving Alaska for states that offer their public employees DB plans or leaving public service altogether, creating a 22% vacancy rate in the public sector. In the state’s second-largest city of Fairbanks, the police department has been forced to close for four hours every day due to inadequate staffing. The city can only keep one staffer at the station and zero officers on duty from 8 a.m. until noon to serve the people who live, work, and go to school there. In much of rural Alaska, where there are too few state troopers to respond to every call, many domestic abuse situations, alcohol and drug-related crimes, and property crimes currently go uninvestigated due to a lack of personnel. In some of these areas, it is not abnormal to have only one police officer to patrol 100 square miles.
In the 2023-2024 legislative session, lawmakers attempted to return to a DB system to help mitigate the dangerously high vacancy rates in the public safety sector by introducing several bills aimed at developing new DB plans. However, infiltration by outside groups like the Reason Foundation halted the passage of Senate Bill 88, which would have restored pensions for all public employees, including firefighters and police officers.
Case Study: Connecticut
The domino closure of Connecticut’s municipal public safety pension plans resulted in such drastic shortages that multiple cities have decided to revert to DB pensions to stave off “department hopping” for better benefits. The first town to rescind its decision to offer 401(k)s instead of pension plans was Branford in 2016, only five years after making the initial switch. The rash of both new and established officers who left the department for nearby cities that still offered pensions decimated the public safety program in Branford, leaving them no choice but to revert to pensions. More recently, the cities of Trumbull and West Haven voted to reopen their pension plans in 2023 after dealing with years of unstable staffing levels and increased workload for remaining officers.
Pensions Will Build Teams that Save Lives
On March 1, 2024, 26-year-old Sydney Thomas was working, driving a semi-truck over the Clark Memorial Bridge in Louisville, Kentucky, when an oncoming vehicle swerved in front of her, causing her to lose control of her truck. When the truck eventually came to a stop, it was dangling nose-down, 100 feet above the Ohio River over the side of the bridge. Unable to escape from the precarious vehicle, Thomas had no choice but to wait a harrowing 45 minutes hanging over the rushing water below while the Louisville Police and Fire Departments negotiated a plan to save her. NPPC had a chance to sit down with Bryce Carden, the 6-year Louisville Fire Department veteran who was lowered over the edge of the bridge via crane to retrieve Thomas from the wreckage. Carden, who is a first-generation firefighter, talked about the importance of building a team you can trust with your life. “So I talk about family, trusting the guys, teamwork–I knew those guys had me,” he said. “You learn from the guys who came before you, and now I’ll pass it on to the guys who come after me.”
Carden also discussed the impact a loss of pensions for firefighters has had on keeping personnel in the public safety sector, specifically in the capital city of Louisville. “I think everyone in the department has had staffing shortages,” he said. “There was a whole year where companies were riding short, and that puts us at risk. We’re operating with less people, and we still deal with it, companies getting cut all the time.”
Public Safety Workers Deserve a Secure Retirement
NIRS’s latest report is another illustration of the critical role that the expectation of retirement security plays in keeping communities safe. Police officers, firefighters, and other public safety workers are always there when we need them. To keep it that way, we must continue to support the preservation and expansion of DB pensions in the public sector.
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