Gov. Butch Otter now says he's prepared to co-sponsor legislation to ban purchases of additional retirement service for state employees to get them to retire early - a practice that resulted in $125,000 in such state expenditures in 2009, including $72,781 for a single employee.     Wayne Hammon, Otter's budget director and acting human resources director, said he's proposed some changes to the bill, HB 604, but they simply move the ban to a different section of state law and still have the same effect. "I invited the three cosponsors of HB 604 to join the governor in co-sponsoring this bill," Hammon said this morning.

Hammon took over former Human Resources Director Judie Wright when she agreed to retire eight months earlier than planned, in exchange for the large payment into her Public Employee Retirement Fund of Idaho account. State law strictly bans severance payments to state employees who leave their jobs voluntarily, but such retirement boosts weren't considered severance because the payments went to the employees' accounts at PERSI, not directly to the employees. "It's been debated at length, and while we maintain that we did nothing wrong, in these times when we're watching every penny, we believe there's better ways to spend the taxpayer dollar," Hammon said. He said the Otter Administration has an Attorney General's opinion stating that what it did in Wright's case - and several others in the past year - was legal, but the governor has decided it's best to change the law "when we're cutting everything."

---

---