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End this sugary perk for lawmakers

It’s painful to consider the ways our state built its pension crisis. State lawmakers refusing to pay into funds when required by law. End-of-career salary bumps creating extravagant payouts. Employees double- and triple-dipping.

There’s another less-known culprit, too: a law that boosts the pensions for some of the more than 400 legislators who also have worked in another public job.

As reported Wednesday by Daily Herald Suburban Tax Watchdog columnist Jake Griffin, the state’s Reciprocal Act allows some of them to combine their previous years of public service with legislative service to maximize retirement payouts, basing it on the more generous pension plan, which usually is the one for state legislators.

This should not be. Nobody, no matter how excellent a teacher, no matter how influential a lawmaker — a part-time position, we might add — deserves such a benefit from taxpayers. Whatever its original intent, the decades-old law smacks of the thinking that got this state into trouble, and it is time to remove it.

Illinois cannot afford these sweeteners. In the case of one former teacher and lawmaker from East Dundee, the Reciprocal Act increased her annual pension more than $27,000 above what she would have received from both her legislative and teacher pensions if the law didn’t exist. She is allowed to use her six years as a legislator and 14 of her 27 years of teaching to count toward her General Assembly pension, which pays out 85 percent of a final salary after 20 years.

Meanwhile, the state’s pension liability remains the highest in the nation. And lawmakers let the spring session end without dealing with it.

As Griffin reported, the General Assembly did in fact weaken the Reciprocal Act in the 1990s by barring pension inflation when a former legislator lands a high-paid job with another government agency. But the provision to use legislative service as the basis for pensions of those who worked in other public jobs still exists.

Rank-and-file private sector workers and most other public employees have access to no such perks. In January we supported a proposal by state Rep. Jack Frank of Marengo to end pensions for Illinois lawmakers as a way of staying in tune with the people who voted them in. Not surprisingly, the bill didn’t get far.

One freshman legislator, state Rep. Tom Morrison of Palatine, announced he would forego his pension. Among the lawmakers who qualify for the Reciprocal Act, the least they could do is opt out of receiving these supersweet, taxpayer-funded bonuses unavailable to anyone else.

Last year’s bill that limited pension benefits for workers hired in 2011 and beyond was a meaningful step toward reform. But everyone knows there’s still more to do — and ending the Reciprocal Act should be on that list.