Nearly 3,000 retired New York state employees receive pensions worth over $100,000 a year, according to data released on Thursday.
Non-profit company See Through NY released the data stating 2,931 retired state employees are each costing taxpayers at least $100,000 this fiscal year. Ten of these 2,900 retirees are getting $200,000 or more.
In the state of New York, there are 394,000 people receiving pensions funds, ranging from $14 to $261,649 a year. (RELATED: Chicago Fired 1,400 Teachers To Fund Extravagant Pensions)
For the sixth year in a row, retired president of the University at Albany, SUNY and former executive director of the state Teachers’ Retirement System George M. Philip, received the highest pension from taxpayers. According to the Empire Center, in the 2015 fiscal year which ended in March, the former school official earned $261,649 in pension funds.
New York is $370 billion in debt, has an unemployment rate of 5.2 percent and a population of nearly 20 million people.
Last fiscal year, only 2,700 former state employees earned pensions over $100,000, but this year the New York government added an additional 200 people who now earn six-figure pensions, according to the New York Post.
New York’s Employees’s Retirement System allowed people who retired in 2014 and have 35 years of service under their belt to receive an average pension of $52,517, according to the Empire Center. Other former employees who retired in 2014 but only worked part-time for the government, received an average pension of $27,078.
All in, New York spent $9.7 billion on pensions for the 2015 fiscal year, an increase from last year’s $9.3 billion in expenditures.
