Robert and Joan Fleishell have been expecting monthly county pension checks between $200 and $300 to arrive soon.
But under a new proposal to extend the minimum retirement age for Baltimore County personnel, they?ll have to wait until they turn 65 ? five years later than they expected when Joan Fleishell left the county to have a baby.
“That?s $200 or $300 a month in my pocket, not the county?s,” Robert Fleishell said. “If we had known they were going to do this, what would we have done? Maybe invested it ourselves.”
Joan Fleishell is one of an estimated 400 former county employees who will have to wait five years longer than expected to receive payments under the proposal, designed as an incentive to keep existing employees working longer.
County officials said the vast majority of departing employees choose to collect their payments and reinvest it themselves. An exemption from the new minimum retirement age for former employees is unlikely, said Don Mohler, a spokesman for County Executive Jim Smith.
“We are trying to make the changes equitable and compatible with the changes being implemented for current employees,” Mohler said.
Other former employees emphasized the county?s pension system is mandatory, and said existing employees have labor unions to bargain for them.
Mike Gimbel, a frequent Smith critic who worked as the county?s drug czar for 22 years, said he expected to collect his monthly pension payments of about $1,900 when he turns 60 in less than five years.
Now, he must wait more than nine.
“It?s just cruel,” Gimbel said. “We worked our time for the county and were forced to be in the retirement system. We have planned our fiscal lives around that.”
Five of six bargaining units for existing employees have accepted the proposal ? which only applies to employees with less than 30 years of service ? in tentative agreements. The last group is scheduling a full-member vote in the next two weeks.
