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WEIGHING IN – Ahead of the State of the State address last month, state Sen. Jim Tedisco briefly pulled Gov. Kathy Hochul aside and asked if she would meet with representatives of the 1,100-plus former St. Clare’s workers who suddenly lost all or a portion of their pensions in 2018.
“Certainly, certainly,” the governor apparently told Tedisco.
More than a month after that interaction, which was reported on at the time by multiple outlets, the meeting hasn’t happened.
This week, the Governor’s Office finally reached out to schedule a meeting. However, it’s not exactly what Mary Hartshorne, chairwoman of the St. Clare’s Pension Recovery Alliance, had in mind. Instead of meeting with the governor herself, the current plan is for Hartshorne to talk with staffers.
“I’m not asking her to jump through hoops of fire. I’m not even asking her to jump. I just want her to speak,” said Hartshorne, who worked in St. Clare’s radiology department for nearly 30 years. She’s hoping for five minutes with the governor.
Hochul should grant it.
It seems worth noting that the meeting, which is currently planned as a Zoom call on March 7 with Chatodd Floyd, the governor’s deputy secretary for legislative affairs and policy, and another staffer, was set up directly after the Governor’s Office learned I was checking in on the status of the meeting. I first emailed the Governor’s Office on Monday at 10:44 a.m. Her office then reached out to Tedisco’s office that afternoon. Late Thursday afternoon, the Governor’s Office responded to my request for comment with this: “These hardworking New Yorkers deserve better and we continue working with stakeholders and legislators to determine whether there are additional solutions on top of what the state has already contributed.”
“I didn’t say meet with the staff,” Tedisco said this week. “I said could you give them five minutes. And to suggest that it hasn’t risen to that level? I don’t know what has to happen to 1,100 of her constituents to have some intervention or discussion with them.”
For the former employees of the now-defunct Schenectady hospital, the meeting with a staffer instead of the governor feels like another broken promise. After all, this stems from the fact that they haven’t been given their owed pension amounts, which total a roughly $55 million shortfall. The shortfall came because leaders of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany, which was affiliated with St. Clare’s, and administrators of the pension fund not only allegedly failed to manage the pension fund, they also allegedly failed to properly inform employees about the pension’s troubles. In addition, hospital leaders failed to insure the pension plan, taking advantage of an IRS ruling that granted the diocese’s and hospital corporation’s request to declare the St. Clare’s pension plan a plan of the church, which made it exempt from the Employment Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA).
Late last year, a judge ruled that two high-powered lawsuits against the diocese — one filed last May by New York Attorney General Letitia James, the other a 2019 filing by the AARP Foundation — could merge, providing a sense of optimism.
Yet, no resolution has come.
The roughly 1,100 employees, with 10 to 50 years of service, were technicians, cafeteria workers, nurses and doctors. Hartshorne said it’s heartbreaking every time she’s forced to provide one of these former workers with an insufficient update.
“We’re constantly kicked to the curb. We’re not important. Why is this happening?” Hartshorne said. “We’re not bad people, we’re the exact opposite. We’re the people that are nurturers and carers.”
Hartshorne said she doesn’t want to ask the governor for any state funding — a notion that has been floated as a possible means to provide the pensioners support. She and her fellow pensioners want the diocese to pay up and finally rectify the mess they seem to have created.
Hartshorne said she simply wants to ask for the governor’s advice.
“As the leader of our state,” Hartshorne said, “what would you advise us to do? I want her to give me her take on all of this and how she thinks we should approach it.”
Hartshorne just wants the pensioners to be heard.
Tedisco said he heard the governor say “certainly” twice inside the state Capitol, seeming to agree to a meeting.
The least Hochul can do now is take a few minutes to listen.
Columnist Andrew Waite can be reached at [email protected] and at 518-417-9338. Follow him on Twitter @UpstateWaite.
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This article leaves out the fact that NYS forced the hospital to close via the Berger Commission. The actuaries provided a $28.5 million figure to the state thinking that would be enough to support the pension. It wasn’t. Why would we not want additional funds from the state for this fiasco that they are the root cause of?