8/27 meeting

 I was in the Iron Range at a family emergency and missed the meeting. I was able to obtain a video of it.

These are my observations:

The Committee chair and most of the work group refer to inmates we work with as 'clients.' It seems a ploy to diminish the danger in the corrections field.

They spent a lot of  time trying to figure out how to get around the inmate contact wording in our pension. The Statewide Director of Communications for the State Patrol, equated our "front line" contact with "clients"  as equal to dispatch contact on bad calls. 

Because the square peg didn't fit in the round hole the Chair asked and received confirmation that could be done simply by getting the legislature to change the definition of who fit in our pension.

A couple of members rightly brought up the opposition they're likely to face from CO's and from the Probation Officers who were denied in 2003.

Another point they kept arguing was that a dispatcher gets 'nothing' when they retire. They arrive at that by woke math. They take their actual retirement date, which is 65 then calculate it at a 55 retirement date with 10 years of penalty deductions. That comes to something like 40% of their full retirement if they stayed until  65. 

Doug Anderson, PERA Executive Director brought up the reality that adding dispatchers to our pension could cost as much as $350,000 each for those at or near retirement. That also brings up the reality this would decrease the number of dispatchers, not increase it.