2001 House Bill 5112 ↩

Senate Roll Call 285: Passed

To authorize a one-time early retirement incentive pension enhancement program for judges. Currently, judges’ retirement benefits are capped after 16 years in office at 60 percent of final salary, no matter how many additional years are served. This would be increased to 80 percent for judges over age-50 who have served at least 24 years, increasing their annual pension by approximately $28,000. Circuit judges are paid $139,918 a year, and district judges get $138,272. The substitute also contains a provision linking judges retirement health care benefits to a new state pension fund health care sub-account, which would pay for future state retiree health care benefits (see Senate-passed version of House Bill 5109 for details). The retirement incentive is part of a proposed realignment of probate, district, and circuit court boundaries in the more sparsely-populated northern part of the state, in order to ease the operation of Family Courts. This is contained in the Senate substitute for <a href="/bill.asp?ID=7547">House Bill 5674</a>. This bill originally just extended to judges’ pensions the same protection against being alienated (taken) in a bankruptcy procedures as that afforded under current law to private sector pensions, and this provision is still included. The bill is tie-barred to <a href="/bill.asp?ID=6533">House Bill 5109</a>, which was substituted to insert a state employee “early out” retirement incentive proposal previously contained in <a href="/bill.asp?ID=7610">House Bill 5732</a>.