Borough emergency responders sue over benefits

PALMER — With hours for Mat-Su Borough firefighters restricted to 30 per week and grumblings among the rank-and-file growing, a class action lawsuit has been filed against the borough seeking back retirement benefits for all entitled first-responders.

“The defendant, MSB, by refusing or neglecting to include plaintiffs among those MSB employees entitled to (Public Employees Retirement System) benefits, breached its statutory, implied, express, contractual and fiduciary duties to plaintiffs to ensure that all its employees meeting minimum PERS eligibility requirements would be provided with PERS benefits, the violation for which plaintiffs seek declaratory relief establishing their retroactive inclusion within the MSB PERS program and for damages to be proven at trial, but not less than the maximum PERS contributions which MSB should have made (to) plaintiffs during their employment,” states the lawsuit, dated Friday.

The suit comes in the wake of a decision from the Retirement and Benefits Division of the state Department of Administration, which conducted an audit of the borough in 2012. The division concluded the borough must provide retirement contributions to employees who work more than 30 hour per week, even those the borough classifies as paid-on-call employees rather than full- or part-time employees.

In response, the borough has limited hours for firefighters and medics, promising that the budget it will draft in the coming months will include more full-time staff positions.

The borough has said it can’t afford to provide the PERS benefits to all responders who go over 30 hours per week. When the state made its conclusion about including those employees in PERS, borough manager John Moosey said the Mat-Su simply can’t afford the estimated $1.75 million annual hit to the fire services budget. For 2014, the borough budgeted a little more than $9.3 million for all its fire service areas. The full-time benefits would increase that budget by more than 18 percent.

The lawsuit, drafted by Ronald A. Offret of the Anchorage law firm Agletti, Offret and Woofter, includes as plaintiffs all entitled borough responders, but only names one specifically — Steven Barenburg, an assistant chief for the West Lakes Fire Department.

J.E. Wiederholt, a former borough responder and current attorney at the firm that drafted the lawsuit, said in an email that the action speaks for itself.

“While MSB was long ago requested to provide answers to questions respecting its failure to provide PERS benefits, it’s still unexplained failure to respond is in large part the reason for the complaint,” he wrote.

The borough has said that the state has not said or implied there would be any retroactive liability for employees that should have been included in the benefits system but weren’t. That doesn’t mean the responders are barred from seeking them through the legal system.

The borough has said that it simply could not afford to offer PERS contributions to all the responders who would qualify if the cap in hours were lifted. But the borough said it does intend to transition to having more full-time employees in busier parts of the borough.

“There’s no way we could afford to make the adjustment all in one step, but we’re working on a proposal that I will be submitting to the assembly in moving that forward,” Moosey said about the situation in December.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.