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DROP's effect on retirement choices

The Nutter administration released a report Tuesday that put a $258 million price tag on the city's 11-year-old DROP retirement program.

The Nutter administration released a report Tuesday that put a $258 million price tag on the city's 11-year-old DROP retirement program.

The report also examined the program's impact on employees' retirement decisions.

Among the findings: Not all employees are the same. With DROP in place, non-uniformed workers delayed their retirement an average of 15 months, firefighters an average of 11 months, and police just two months.

"High-quality" firefighters delayed their retirement much longer than "high-quality" police officers, "a possible reflection of the differences between post-retirement career options for police and fire employees," wrote the authors of the $80,000 study, a project of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

For non-uniformed workers, the study "found no evidence that high-quality employees delayed retirement."

Anthony Webb, one of the report's three authors, said they used pay-raise data - "whether an employee had an abnormally large pay raise" - to define high-quality employees. Of the 63,558 employees included in the study, about 10 percent qualified as "high quality" under this methodology.

Who was left out of the study? Webb said the authors excluded 48 elected officials because the sample size was too small - even though it was the participation of some of those officials in DROP that ignited a political firestorm.

"It is impossible to say whether the DROP incentive was driving their behavior," Webb said. He said he was not asked or pressured by administration officials to treat the 48 officeholders separately.

City Finance Director Rob Dubow similarly said that the number was so tiny that it would not allow for retirement behavior by that particular group to be determined.