Poll: LI voters favor public-pension cuts

More than 70 percent of Long Island voters favor cutting pension benefits for government workers, with a third saying the cuts should extend to employees already on the job, according to a Newsday/Siena College Research Institute poll.

Thirty-four percent of 804 respondents in Nassau and Suffolk favored reducing pension benefits for both current and future municipal employees. Thirty-seven percent said they'd reduce benefits only for future employees, while 26 percent said pensions shouldn't be touched.

Respondent Jim Rochford, 68, of Bellerose Terrace, said reining in escalating government pension costs was "just common sense."

"When everything's going great with the economy, people just pass it over," said Rochford, a retired importer/exporter. "With the unfortunate times we're in now, it's a matter of people waking up and saying, 'What the hell have we missed all these years?' "

"The pendulum has swung, and I think we're going to see continued pressure on public employees and labor unions to make concessions," said Siena pollster Donald Levy. "Right now public sentiment is not strongly with them."

The pension questions were among several in the poll that focused on potential fixes to the counties' budget shortfalls. Overall, voters were overwhelmingly against raising property taxes, with 90 percent either strongly opposed or opposed, compared with 9 percent who were supportive. But they oppose cutting services, 59 percent to 37 percent, and are against laying off more county workers by a margin of 64 percent to 33 percent.

The poll was conducted with registered voters by phone Dec. 12-15 and 18-19. Its margin of error is plus/minus 3.5 percentage points.

The poll shows increasing awareness of the public pension system and how its costs to taxpayers can spike based on volatile stock market conditions, said E.J. McMahon, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think thank.

About half of the assets in the $134-billion New York State pension fund are invested in publicly traded domestic and foreign equities, and the fund has absorbed significant losses during the economic downturn. Newsday has reported that local taxpayers will pay $2.9 billion into the state public pension system during the next two years, up 69 percent from the previous two years.

"It's pretty noteworthy that you have an overwhelming majority supporting cutting benefits for anybody," McMahon said, citing the combined 71 percent that would reduce pensions for at least future employees. "Usually, with cutting anyone's retirement benefits, people get defensive even if it's not theirs."

But Frank Mauro, of the left-leaning Fiscal Policy Institute, noted that more than 60 percent of respondents wouldn't touch current workers' pension benefits. He said most public employees have pensions in the $20,000 range, not the six-figure totals pulled in by some school superintendents. "I think most people see through the miasma of all this," Mauro said.

Jeff Joseph, 48, a Melville resident who manufactures high-end loudspeakers, said cutting pensions for current workers is akin to "changing the rules of the game after the fact." He also opposes cuts for future workers.

"It's not fair," said Joseph, a Democrat. "Being a public employee, generally, in my view, means not getting paid as much, so it's the benefits where they're competitive."

On the overall issue of county deficits, Laurie Bonomo, 38, of Mount Sinai, said she'd rather see the elimination of many top-level positions instead of layoffs of more lower-paid workers.

"I support a cut of duplicate workers, more so in administrative positions than in your standard public employee positions," said Bonomo, a yoga teacher. "I feel like the public employees are usually the first to go, but you still have six people doing the same job up top."

When asked about consolidating Nassau and Suffolk into a single county government, respondents also balked, with 62 percent opposed, 30 percent supportive and 8 percent who didn't know or had no opinion.

"They're already two very big counties," said Millicent Wadsworth, 65, an insurance company employee from West Babylon. "That would be way too big."