On Friday, June 17, Okaloosa Circuit Judge William Stone listened to the attorneys for the Escamia County Commission and Clerk Pam Childers battle over the county’s 401(a) retirement plan.
Though the plan has been in place since 1997, Childers has declared the plan illegal for Commissioners Robert Bender, Steven Barry and Lumon May, even though the cost to the taxpayers is the same as the commissioners’ other retirement option, the Florida Retirement System.
Weeks after the board fired her friend, County Administrator Janice Gilley, and she claimed she had been told that the commissioners had privately insulted her in an elevator, Childers reduced the checks to the 401(a) plan to 8% and then discontinued all payments at the end of 2021. The once-daily newspaper has spent a lot of ink bashing the commissioners and the Levin Papantonio Rafferty law firm that represents the board for free.
Attorney Troy Rafferty told Inweekly that the Friday hearing was “basically both sides asking to dismiss the other one’s lawsuits,” which he said ws common in the early stages of most civil litigation.
The attorney was impressed almost a hundred people joined the Zoom hearing to listen the arguments presented over two hours to Judge Stone.
“I’m excited that the public was involved because of the amount of misinformation that’s being put out there,” Rafferty said. “This has nothing to do with taxpayer money. This program costs the taxpayers nothing more than the Florida Retirement System.”
He explained that Barry, Bender and May are going up lifetime benefits by participating in the 401(a). When a person in FRS dies, their spouses continues to receive benefit checks. Rafferty said, “This idea that somehow the clerk is protecting the taxpayers is just flat out wrong.”
He added, “The only way these taxpayers are losing money is because she’s hired two law firms to try and continue this political vendetta against these three commissioners. That’s all it is.”
For Rafferty, the clerk is lashing out at the commissioners to exact political revenge. He told Inweekly, “This is all just political fighting, and not by the commissioners, by her. This is the clerk picking this as an issue in order to try and be vindictive against constitutional officers.”