Town says employees can’t ‘buy back’ time toward retirements.
By Gail Geraghty
Staff Writer

OXFORD – Voters at a Sept. 17 special town meeting will be asked to decide a dispute between selectmen and town employees over the town’s status with the Maine State Retirement System. If the dispute is not resolved, it could end up in court, said Town Manager Michael Huston.

MSRS and eight town employees who want to buy back their time in the retirement program maintain that the town never formally withdrew from the program. As a result, the town is liable for around $50,000 in interest and missed employer contributions based on the purchase of previous service credit for the eight employees. But selectmen maintain the town did formally withdraw from the program, in a March 1993 letter to MSRS requesting the town be put on its inactive list.

Apparently, they have the opinion of the town attorney, Geoff Hole, to back them up. Selectmen met with Hole in executive session and agreed to the wording of a warrant article for the Sept. 17 meeting. The wording would, in effect, ratify that the March 1993 letter served as sufficient notice of the town’s withdrawal from the program.

MSRS said the letter was not sufficient, because it was not certified and did not contain a copy of the vote taken that authorized the withdrawal.

If voters don’t want to legally challenge whether the letter was adequate notice, a second part of the warrant article asks voters if they want to withdraw from MSRS effective the last day of the month following the MSRS’s board receipt of a certified notice of the Sept. 17 vote.

The withdrawal from MSRS would only affect new hires, not the eight employees who want to continue with the plan. Those employees are Theron Bickford, Adam Hart, Steven Ivey, Sharon Jackson, Erlon Pike, Ralph Cookson, Beth Heino, Rickie Jack and Ellen Morrison.

The town joined the Maine State Retirement System at a special town meeting in July of 1974. For years, there were only a few participants, and by the late 1980s there were no active participants. Huston said selectmen decided to stop offering Maine State Retirement sometime between March of 1988 and March of 1989. New hires were told that the retirement program was not a benefit offered by the town, so there were no new persons who enrolled.

In 2001, however, Police Sgt. Theron Bickford called MSRS for information about having the town join the system, and was told the town was still a member of the system. Since then, he and the other seven employees have been collecting information from the town managers about what it would take to buy back the benefit with full credit for the time they had worked for the town.

At the last meeting, Selectman Roger Smedberg maintained that employees have been “circumventing” the Board of Selectmen by their actions. He said Social Security benefits constitute a retirement plan.

But Jackson said Smedberg, Dennis Sanborn and Dave Ivey were on the board when former Town Manager Jim Rhodes wrote Fire Chief Fred Knightly a letter in September of 2001 making it clear town employees were eligible to join MSRS. The letter indicated that copies be sent to selectmen.

“The time to stop was September and October of 2001,” Jackson said. “It’s been two years since and in that period eight people have joined Maine State Retirement. They bought back their time.” Jackson said she did it all in one $8,000 lump sum; others are making payroll deductions.

Smedberg said “All I can say is that those eight employees weren’t offered it when they were hired. We didn’t know we had it.”

ggeraghty@sunjournal.com

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