PERS lawsuit continues

MAT-SU — Legal maneuvers continue in the lawsuit seeking to reimburse emergency responders for retirement benefits they didn’t receive, with the latest filing hoping to allow responders to file a lawsuit against the Mat-Su Borough as a group.

“Evidence will show that MSB negligently and/or intentionally denied plaintiffs (Public Employee Retirement System) benefits; in breach of its constitutional, contractual, and fiduciary duties, by means of artificial and discriminatory job classifications,” reads the latest filing, penned by plaintiffs’ attorney Ronald A. Offret.

The borough has said that emergency responders were on-call employees rather than permanent employees. But the state of Alaska ordered the borough in 2013 to either allow those employees to buy into the state retirement system, or not let them work more than 30 hours per week. Since then, the borough has brought on more full-time medics and firefighters to try and make up for the gap caused by limiting responders hours.

The borough has said that its conversations with the state indicated that the state wouldn’t be requiring retroactive payments to responders. That doesn’t mean the responders can’t sue to get those benefits, though. And that’s what they did.

“Plaintiffs have sued MSB because it wrongfully refused to include Plaintiffs within PERS; for decades,” reads Offret’s filing.

Various officials have been deposed in the case, including Mat-Su Borough Emergency Services Director Dennis Brodigan, who provided a figure that Offret cites again and again in his filing.

“Prior to January 2014, fully 27.9 percent of the borough’s emergency workforce ‘worked more than 720 hours,’” Offret writes, quoting Brodigan.

In 2011, that number was 103 responders who met the state’s requirement for having to at least be offered state retirement benefits.

So how much money is at stake? A definitive estimate is hard to pin down.

One responder, Andrea Richey, calculated that had she been in the retirement system for her career, she would have a $50,000 account balance by now.

Some of that is investment income, some of it is matching funds paid by the responder. The borough’s portion is probably closer to $13,000.

Richey has documents showing that 12 of the 13 years she worked for the borough included time worked over 780 hours in a year — the maximum number an employee can work and not qualify for the retirement plan. In six of those years the total was greater than 1,500 hours, and the highest number was 2,518.

But even figuring out how many responders qualify is tricky. Richey named 27 of them in her filings in the case. Offret estimates it could be as many as 300.

Not all of those, though, constitute the same potential liability as Richey. Some responders have fewer years of service and some have more.

And the borough, according to filings it made, intends to argue that there is a statute of limitations at play; that even if responders are owed this money they are only owed it for the last three years.

Offret thinks they can’t argue that — he writes that there are rules stating that the limitation applies to the date a worker learned he or she was owed money, not the date on which the person was first denied it. He is seeking benefits back 20 years.

Whatever the case, civil cases proceed relatively slowly, regularly taking more than a year to resolve.

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