Retired NYC sanitation worker makes $285K a year from pension

A retired New York City sanitation worker cashes in on a $285,047-a-year pension, The New York Post reported.  (Reuters)
A former Sanitation Department honcho is pulling in an astonishing $285,047-a-year pension — more than twice what he was making on the job, according to newly released data.
And that’s just one of dozens of huge pension payouts revealed in records published Tuesday by the Empire Center for Public Policy— data that lay bare the city’s insanely generous pension system, the government watchdog said.
“Pensions like these are unheard of in the private sector — and deserve the close scrutiny of taxpayers,” said Tim Hoefer, executive director of the Empire Center.
“The long list of six-figure pensioners in the New York City Employees’ Retirement System shows just how great a burden the city has placed on its finances,” Hoefer added.
Eugene Egan, the garbage-hauling agency’s longtime director of labor relations, was earning $128,189 a year when he retired in 2015, public records show.
But because the 86-year-old Bronx man started working for the department before July 1973, he was enrolled in the city’s most lavish pension plan — known as Tier 1 — and was able to continue growing his retirement pot throughout a lengthy career.
Asked about his lifetime golden handshake on Tuesday, the golden oldie became defensive and called the figures “fake news.”
“You’ll go ahead and say I’m ripping off the city ’cause I got a pension,” Egan said at the door of his two-story home in the Bronx, saying he didn’t want to look “like a bum.”
“The fact is that I worked almost 60 years for it,” he added.
While he was still working for the Sanitation Department, Egan didn’t like other workers at the agency knowing how long he’d been there, a department insider who worked with him told the Post — but said he was known as a good and knowledgeable guy.
The source said Egan kicked in his own contributions over the years to help fatten his final pension check.
Egan wouldn’t break down the details of his sweet Tier 1 deal, which is no longer available to today’s city workers. The average Department of Sanitation pension is $49,405, according to the Empire Center.
“You retire. That’s it,” he snapped, before shutting the door on a Post reporter, instructing him to “get an honest job.”