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| DOMENICI & WILSON DISMISS DOE EXCUSES FOR REJECTING SANDIA LAB RETIREMENT PACKAGE SWEETENERS |
September 13, 2000 |
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| Lawmakers Make Case for Improving Sandia’s Retirement Program
WASHINGTON-- U.S. Senator Pete Domenici and Congresswoman Heather Wilson today expressed disappointment with the Department of Energy’s response to their April request to reconsider the department’s rejection of a plan to enhance the retirement program available to Sandia National Laboratories’ employees.
The two New Mexico lawmakers today sent Energy Secretary Bill Richardson yet another letter asking that DOE reconsider its rejection of retirement enhancements proposed by Sandia. Domenici and Wilson questioned DOE’s response to their initial April correspondence to Richardson. They suggested DOE should encourage improvements in the Sandia plan to match the plans offered by the University of California (UC) to employees of Los Alamos National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
“The response outlined a number of reasons for rejecting Sandia’s proposal but did not offer any alternatives to address the issues raised by our constituents. Sandia’s proposal was a balanced one that attempted to leverage surplus pension assets for the benefit of both the company and its employees and retirees,” Domenici and Wilson wrote. “But that proposal still left the Sandia plan short of the UC plan. Instead of denying any improvement in the Sandia plan, in our view, the Department should be welcoming improvements and encouraging Lockheed-Martin and Sandia to further improve their proposal.”
“Private sector companies,” they wrote, “have flexibilities and motivations that are not available or necessarily appropriate for a national laboratory. For example, many high-tech firms, including some in your surveys, offer stock options and other incentives to their employees, which Sandia cannot. In addition, income generated by surplus pension assets is reported as corporate earnings by private sector companies, which creates a disincentive for them to increase pension benefits for active employees or retirees. Those accounting and corporate earnings pressures do not have the same relevance to Sandia.”
Sandia and its contractor, Lockheed-Martin Corp., have proposed expanding Sandia’s retirement system to reach more “equity” with other DOE laboratories. Currently, the Sandia system provides fewer retirement benefits than those offered by the University of California (UC) for LANL and Lawrence Livermore employees, including an automatic cost-of-living adjustment.
Wilson and Domenici also challenged DOE assertions that expanding benefits may compromise the fiscal stability of the Sandia retirement program, noting that “Sandia’s pension plan assets are more than adequate to cover the additional liabilities created by the proposed changes, and their actuarial projections indicated no impact on future contribution requirements for at least the next 20 years, under a variety of capital market conditions. Additional taxpayer dollars would not be needed to fund these proposed changes.”
“The significant differences in the retirement packages offered by Sandia and the UC labs create a sense of inequity among employees and diminish the perceived value of Sandia’s benefit plans,” Wilson and Domenici wrote. “We believe that the primary concerns consistently expressed by our constituents, the lack of cost-of-living adjustments in recent years and the inappropriate disparity between the Sandia and UC retirement plans, have merit and both of us are committed to addressing them.”
Finally, the lawmakers asked Richardson to share the results of a recently-completed study on the different benefit plans within the DOE complex.
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