This was the agenda for today's meeting: Item 1 attendance turned out to be very important. The workgroup committee has only 2 Corrections Officers that can vote. The CO  from Sherburne County chosen by PERA and the MSRS CO  from the State were not there! (EDIT: After this posting it was learned the vote was scheduled when neither were available.) This meant there was no corrections vote when it came to approving or arguing changes and the all important vote to approve and adopt the report! There is an Advisor a retired CO, Wade Laszlo. He was able to speak but unable to make motions to make  changes to the draft or vote on approval at this meeting. The Chair stated that for something to have consensus there had to be no objections. So there was no consensus to improve the Dispatcher's pension and the line stating "Pension coverage for 911 Telecommunicators should not be changed to the PERA or MSRS Correctional Plans"  was scratched before the meeting ...

Here's the agenda for the 911 Telecommunicators Pension Benefits Working Group for the January 28th meeting. Under Section E Testimonials LELS had submitted 7 anonymous testimonials. Objections were made to submitting anonymous testimony in an Official Government Document after the First Draft. That appears to be corrected in 6 of the 7. MNCORA's testimonials all had names attached. One of the chief arguments of 911 Dispatchers to receive an early retirement or join the Correctional Plans was the stress on their job and injuries. Below is a table from Page A-22 of the Appendix (Source MN Workers Comp Database): Of note, from 2012 to 2020 Dispatchers had 23 claims while Corrections Officers had 895. Once Covid hit out of the 378 claims (from 2018 - 2020)  28% of Correctional Officers claims were due to Covid. In the same period Dispatchers had 0 claims due to  Covid exposure. As a matter of fact Dispatchers had 0 claims due to disease for the entire period of 2012 - 2020. Also...

Sherburne Co Jail The good news is the Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) for the PERA Correctional Plan is 2.5% for 2022. Of course the bad news is inflation is at 7%. A draft of the letter to be given to the LCPR was sent to committee members for review. It is not finalized. The draft does state that no consensus was reached on improving the dispatch pension or adding them to the PERA Correctional Plan. The Pension Benefits Working Group has one more meeting scheduled for January 28th. No agenda is out yet, but most probably discussing Chad Burkitt's draft letter to finalize. We will update when more is available.