The last time Greg Royer, Washington State University’s vice president for business and finance, was in the news, he was involved in a yelling-swearing-physical kerfuffle with Steven Hoch, a WSU provost turned highly paid history professor.
It’s possible they were arguing about who had the most outrageous taxpayer-financed compensation package.
In May 2008, Hoch was hired as a $300,000-a-year provost. Within weeks, he was dismayed with the job, which didn’t match his idea of what he thought it would be. By all accounts, his colleagues were at least as dismayed with him. WSU President Elson Floyd stripped Hoch of his provost’s job in November 2008. But because Hoch had tenure written into his contract, he couldn’t be fired. He was re-assigned, instead, to WSU’s Tri-Cities campus, where he earns $245,000 a year to teach history. The average instructor at the campus earns $58,000.
Outrageous.
The only thing that would be more so is if someone were allowed to retire, collect a pension, and then be rehired without the position being advertised.
Oh, wait. That’s exactly what other higher education employees are doing, a Seattle Times investigation revealed.
Enter WSU’s financial VP Royer, who leads a list of at least 39 other university and community college employees who have exploited a loophole in state retirement laws, allowing them to double-dip into the ever-evaporating state well by collecting a salary and a pension.
With a salary of $304,000, Royer is among highest-paid state employees, the Times reported. And, for nearly seven years, he has also collected an annual pension of $105,000.
Royer declined to be interviewed for the article, but told university officials he would resign this week, several months earlier than planned.
Maybe he’ll demure at having another retirement party.
Some double-dippers defend the practice, noting it’s not “illegal.” At least not until the Legislature catches up to the loopholes. The practice is, however, obviously unethical. And when people in the ivory tower defend collecting a generous salary and a generous pension, it sounds as if they are unaware, or don’t care, that so many people without government jobs are unemployed and/or have lost their pensions or retirement savings.
Current university officials were not the first to rehire their favorite employees. The double-dipping has been entrenched, the Times report shows. Nor are schools the only culprit.
It’s this type of long-established, flagrant waste of money that rightly makes taxpayers angry. Not unlike the mileage-compensation rules that ferry workers (legally) exploited to supplement their incomes.
State employees bellying up to the entitlement bar as massive cuts are made in education and other services is infuriating. Loopholes indeed.
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