A proposal to limit the amount of paid time off that veteran Los Angeles police and firefighters can take while in a controversial retirement program would save nearly $13 million in the first year, according to a city report.
The Deferred Retirement Option Plan, or DROP, pays participants their salaries and pensions simultaneously for the last five years of their careers. Since the plan’s creation in 2001, police and firefighters have walked away with more than $1.7 billion in extra pension payments, city pension records show.
A Los Angeles Times investigation this year found that nearly half of the veteran officers and firefighters who joined DROP — they must be 50 with 25 years of experience — subsequently took injury leaves, typically for bad backs, sore knees and other ailments that afflict aging bodies regardless of profession.
Their average absence was about 10 months, but The Times found hundreds of cases in which employees had taken off more than a year at essentially twice their normal pay.