SANTA FE \u2013 Legislators are drafting a plan to ease restrictions against retired police officers coming back to work, in an effort to add law enforcement officers across New Mexico amid a labor shortage.<\/p>\n
At a legislative committee hearing Tuesday, retired police officer and state Rep. Bill Rehm of Albuquerque outlined a proposal for changes to retirement provisions for police that would incentivize a return to work. He said officers might continue to draw pension benefits while working and contributing to the pension fund, or delay retirement benefits for a bigger payout later.<\/p>\n
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham is calling for the deployment of 1,000 additional police officers across the state amid public frustration with crime. She says she will ask lawmakers for $100 million to underwrite the initiative.<\/p>\n
Lujan Grisham spokeswoman Nora Meyers Sackett declined to say whether the governor supports return-to-work incentives for retired police.<\/p>\n
New Mexico amended rules at the Public Employees Retirement Association in 2010 to halt so-called double-dipping in response to concerns about fairness and the long-term solvency of the public pension fund for state and local government employees.<\/p>\n
Opponents of retired police rehiring plans say it can hurt morale by limiting career advancement opportunities for ambitious younger officers and threaten efforts to modernize law enforcement agencies.<\/p>\n
Albuquerque\u2019s police force is in the middle of sweeping reforms aimed at reining in police brutality with guidance from the U.S. Department of Justice and court oversight.<\/p>\n
An actuary to the Public Employees Retirement Association said that return-to-work systems can undermine pension solvency if they provide an incentive for many or most employees to retire early and begin drawing on retirement benefits.<\/p>\n
One compromise solution is a buffer period of six months or longer after retirement before an officer can return to the job.<\/p>\n
In 2016, a bill to ease retirement restrictions for police won approval of the state House of Representatives. But it advanced no further.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
FE \u2013 Legislators are drafting a plan to ease restrictions against retired police officers coming back to work, in an effort to add law enforcement officers across New Mexico amid a labor shortage. At a legislative committee hearing Tuesday, retired police officer and state Rep. Bill Rehm of Albuquerque outlined a proposal for changes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[815],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-44142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-associated-press-new-mexico"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44142\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44142"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=44142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}