Today’s article on Metro pensions by Examiner reporter David Francis demonstrates the danger posed by quasi-governmental agencies that are financed with tax dollars — but that don’t answer to taxpayers. Even though taxpayers and Metro riders provide 100 percent of all funding for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority’s retirement system, Metro refuses to disclose the pension fund’s assets or even the names of all six of its trustees.
Incredibly, there’s no government oversight and no requirement that the Transit Employees Retirement Plan follow federal or state disclosure rules. No lessons were apparently learned after former pension fund manager, Alan Bond, was jailed in 1999 for giving kickbacks to a union official. Half of the trustees are appointed by Metro’s general manager and half by Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689. With only insiders running the pension program, nobody is looking out for the taxpayers who fund this cozy deal.
The results of this secrecy and the lack of official accountability are distressingly predictable. Metro employees racked up $70 million of questionable overtime last year alone, more than the system’s current $64 million budget deficit. Hundreds of hourly employees — including bus drivers and train operators — earned more than $100,000 with overtime added; some paychecks exceeded $150,000. When these bloated figures are used to calculate future pension benefits — based on the average of the four highest earning years — some Metro employees will actually earn more in retirement than they do now in their base salaries.
Given such runaway spending, delaying a fare increase was the least General Manager John Catoe could do. Before Metro asks for any more money, taxpayers deserve to know all the facts about this ongoing behind-closed-doors rip-off. Perhaps then we will learn, for example, why a former station manager who was recently transferred to a $33 an hour job in Metro’s training division is still paid $49.53 an hour to stand on a station platform three hours every evening, supposedly “to load people on the trains.” We’re told that’s at the low end of the overtime scale. Employees with higher base salaries and more seniority make even more.
The Examiner has also heard from lower-level Metro employees who bitterly complain about the “buddy system” that lets highly paid senior supervisors and their favored underlings hog overtime, arrive late and leave early, and spend much of their “work day” talking and hanging around station kiosks. Since they’re supervisors, nobody monitors their time-and-a-half behavior. “It’s like being the king,” a disgruntled Metro employee told The Examiner. It’s time the kings of Metro are held to account.
