Fix the Police Pension Gap, Protect Environmental Justice
In New York, dumped garbage and construction waste chokes vacant lots and parklands. Heavy equipment and diesel delivery trucks are left idling next to family homes on busy streets. Illegal, unregulated pesticides are dealt under the table, and tractor-trailers belch thick black smoke over our streets and highways.
Do you recognize some of these problems where you live? In New York, we fight these threats to Mother Nature by keeping the nation’s strongest environmental justice laws and protecting our most vulnerable communities. So why are you still seeing these things happen in your neighborhood?
In part, it’s because someone must actually enforce those environmental laws. And while we congratulate ourselves for passing the laws in Albany, we’ve neglected the officers maintaining them in our backyards.
For decades, New York’s unequal pension system has failed our NYSDEC Environmental Conservation Officers. These frontline defenders enforce more laws and work more years than almost any other police officer in New York — all to receive a state pension benefit that is less lucrative than about 97% of other sworn officers and deputies. At the end of a 25-year career, we guarantee our environmental guardians an inferior retirement, when compared to officers who worked just 20 years to earn a better one.
Every year, Environmental Conservation Officers have asked us to fix the problem. And every year, our tight budgets and bureaucratic hurdles have suddenly become insurmountable. But while Albany obsesses over spreadsheets, the real-world cost is a retention crisis: we are losing the only officers trained to enforce our environmental justice laws.
For every environmental conservation officer not replaced, there’s an illegal fishery harvesting contaminated clams in Jamaica Bay, selling them to restaurants in Queens. For every officer position reallocated elsewhere in NYSDEC, one more auto repair shop might get away with dumping oil and antifreeze into our storm sewers and waterways.
We cannot claim to fight for the environment in New York while we are undercutting the very workforce tasked with protecting it. As chair of the Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus, I have spent my career in government working to ensure New York is a full-fledged partner in the health improvements and quality-of-life gains made by environmental justice communities. We should not be requiring the police officers who directly improve quality of life in these diverse communities, to work more years for a lesser pension.
Enough is enough. Environmental Conservation Officers have asked for a fair 20-year pension for years. They deserve it, and so do the communities they protect. Our state has passed on this fairness before; we owe it to our environmental guardians now.
Michaelle C. Solages represents New York’s 22nd Assembly district.
