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June Executive Board meeting and updates

On June 18th the MNCORA Executive Board met. 

First of all we were very appreciative of the waves of support from our MNCORA CO's statewide. The petitions and card mailing campaigns were a success. Sadly we know we must remain vigilant for the next session.

Some lessons we learned were how many of the Unions purporting to represent CO's actually work against their pension benefits.

We heard from many of our LELS members that they were never informed that LELS was supporting adding dispatchers to the correctional plan. Never once did LELS come out and support CO's on this. LELS Executive Director Jim Mortenson even wrote a letter telling MNCORA to "stop contacting our bargaining units " and "If you want advocate for your current members feel free to do so, but please do not advocate for LELS dispatch and corrections members, that is our job!"

We responded to Jim that MNCORA is not a Union, "We represent only Vested, Retirees and beneficiaries in the PERA Correctional Plan. We have members that are LELS, AFSCME, Teamsters, MNPEA  and Janus. Our goal is to protect the PERA Correctional Plan."

This next session we plan to once again push for a CO seat on the PERA Board and vigilantly watch for any future attempts to dump non-CO's into our plan.

Of major importance is the fact that in 2025 all State and Local CO's will be recognized as Public Safety Officers by the Federal Government. What does this mean to you? If you decide to take an early retirement at age 50 you will no longer face the IRS tax penalty. This will not hold true for dispatch, if they were added to our plan it would add yet another wrinkle in implementing the retirement benefits.





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