The pension administrator for Jacksonville’s police and firefighters will bank about $44,000 more this year after a pair of pay raises that boosted his annual salary to $283,000.
That’s making budget hawks fume and even surprising some counterparts across the state.
“I don’t think you’d find anyone in the state of Florida making that,” said Lynn Wenguer, fund administrator for Fort Lauderdale’s police and fire pension system.
John Keane said he didn’t ask for the raise and that it was recommended by a company the fund pays for advice on compensation.
“It’s just how things are,” he said.
It’s that way because the fund pays Keane by averaging the salaries of the top executives at three other agencies — the Jacksonville Port Authority, the Jacksonville Aviation Authority and the Jacksonville Transportation Authority.
“Executive parallelism I think is the word. … It’s been going on for a long time,” Keane said. He said he has to be more versatile than the heads of those larger agencies, noting he deals with other agencies and with news outlets without government affairs or public information staff that other agencies have.
But Keane doesn’t manage nearly the number of people the other agencies do, said City Councilman John Crescimbeni.
“I don’t think any pay raises are warranted at this point,” Crescimbeni said.
“To base the compensation of the police and fire pension fund manager on the compensation of … [heads of] three completely unrelated operations is in itself a joke.”
Most Florida cities don’t have full-time administrators for public safety pensions, said Jennifer Campbell, who earns $125,000 as administrator for Tampa’s $1.4 billion Fire and Police Pension Fund.
Jacksonville’s fund balance was listed at $783 million in a 2010 annual report completed last year.
Because it’s hard to compare those jobs to others in the same city, Campbell said, fund administrators in Florida informally mail surveys to themselves every year or two to see what the going salary is. The answers range from around $80,000 for smaller communities to six figures in big cities.
But no one tops Keane’s salary, and hasn’t for years, she said.
“We always include John Keane first,” she said.
Keane worked in law enforcement and as a firefighter in earlier careers, and he points out he has run the Jacksonville fund for 22 years. Wenguer agreed experience is a consideration in setting salary.
And although the pay might sound high, funds that don’t pay well can lose top managers to jobs in investment banking, said Hank Kim, executive director of the National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems.
“For the size of his plan, I think that’s pretty much within the norm,” said Kim, who added he counts Keane as “a professional colleague and a fantastic administrator.”
Trustees on Keane’s fund approved his new pay in two pieces at the end of December.
First, they said he deserved $275,000 based on the salaries for independent authority directors that had been described to them in a January 2011 report by Cody & Associates, a Cocoa Beach firm that had also compared Keane’s pay in 2009.
The trustees and Keane had agreed early in the year to put off any decisions about his pay raise, but then in December they set his pay hike and made it retroactive to the start of 2011, giving Keane a lump payment for back wages.
On top of that, the trustees approved a 3 percent hike for 2012.
Jacksonville resident Curtis Lee, a frequent critic of the fund who learned of the raises, said the they shouldn’t have been given when the recession has forced people who pay into the pension fund to accept pay cuts.
“It’s very inappropriate that Mr. Keane would get an [18.4] percent increase at the same time police officers take a 3 percent pay cut,” he said.
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