People depend on the law.

For some, the law is letting them down.

Almost three years ago, the Maine Legislature passed a law that allowed some government employees to retire early, draw their pensions and return to work. The law, however, doesn’t jibe with Internal Revenue Service policy, and it puts individuals and the Maine State Retirement System in jeopardy.

The idea was sound. Teachers with enough time in the system could retire, begin to collect their pensions and keep their health benefits, but also work as a substitute or as an aide in the schools. Experienced teachers could be enticed back into schools with flexible schedules and without the demands of a full-time job. Students win, schools win, the teachers win. Now, it looks like everybody could lose.

Sue Gendron retired as Windham’s superintendent last year to take over as Maine’s education commissioner, the top schools job in the state. Now, Gendron and perhaps hundreds of others face a stark choice: Give up second careers or kiss their pensions goodbye, at least for a while.

If the discrepancy between federal and state laws isn’t ironed out, the state’s retirement system could lose its status as a qualified plan, which means employee contributions won’t be allowed in pre-tax dollars.

We would have thought that someone in the Legislature or former Gov. Angus King’s office would have checked with the IRS before changing the rules. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like that happened in 2001 when the law was passed, even though lawmakers knew of the inconsistencies. The state has no choice but to bring its policies back into line.

It’s a travesty that several hundred workers who made decisions to retire and continue to work in good faith will be hurt. But now the state must act to protect the integrity of the retirement system for all its workers.

As this problem is remedied, we hope current lawmakers can draw a lesson: Check out the ramifications of all those good ideas before they get signed into law and hurt people.

Very wrong


On Friday, the United States’ chief weapons hunter in Iraq, David Kay, resigned.

Over the weekend, he described Iraq’s quest for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons as chaotic, suffering from a “vortex of corruption” and the disillusions of a dictator.

Kay said he is convinced that there were no large stockpiles of weapons and that any weapons Saddam Hussein’s regime might have once had were destroyed in the early to mid-1990s. A bombing raid in 1998 finished off what infrastructure was left, Kay said.

How could we have gotten it so wrong? Kay asked that question and offered some ideas about faults in how intelligence was collected.

Kay describes Iraq before the U.S. invasion as a corrupt police state in near chaos. We missed it. The country’s intelligence system was fooled, misled or used.

And as recently as the State of Union last week, the president maintained that Iraq was a threat to the United States, even citing Kay and his discovery of “weapons of mass destruction-related program activities.” As Kay makes clear, Hussein had the desire but not the wherewithal to develop banned weapons. It’s time to give up the WMD claim, if not the actual search.

The president, Congress and the intelligence community got it very wrong. Now we have to find out why.
[email protected]