California public employees disabled by COVID-19 could get tax-free pensions under proposal
Public employees who become disabled from COVID-19 could be eligible for tax-free pensions under a new proposal from a California lawmaker.
Assembly Bill 845, introduced last week by Assemblyman Freddie Rodriguez, D-Chino, would temporarily create a presumption that employees disabled by COVID-19 were infected on the job for the purposes of pension eligibility.
Work-related injuries can qualify public employees for industrial disability pensions, which, unlike other pensions, are exempt from taxes.
The state has already created a similar presumption for the purpose of workers’ compensation benefits. Legislation approved last year presumes that when peace officers, firefighters and some health care and front-line employees contract the virus, they got it at work.
The legislation makes the same presumption for other classifications of employees if their workplace experienced an “outbreak” of the illness. For workplaces with five to 100 employees, an outbreak is defined as five or more employees contracting the disease at a specific work site in a 14-day period. At workplaces with more than 100 employees, the threshold is 5% of employees at a specific work site.
Rodriguez’s bill would simply extend the presumption to public employees’ retirement benefits, said Terry Brennand, a lobbyist for SEIU California State Council, the bill’s sponsor.
The presumption is rebuttable by employers, meaning they would have the opportunity to make a case that an employee didn’t contract the virus at work. It would expire on Jan. 1, 2023 under Rodriguez’s proposal.
The bill doesn’t mean that anyone who gets COVID-19 would qualify for a disability retirement, Brennand said. He said the provision is aimed at employees who, for example, suffer lasting lung damage that makes them unable to work.
Brennand said he is not aware of any numbers of those kinds of debilitating illnesses from the disease, but employees still face uncertainty related to the virus.
Two studies, by researchers at the University of Washington and the other from the University of California San Francisco, have shown that up to one in three people who have contracted the virus face long-term effects, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Monday.
This story was originally published February 24, 2021 at 5:25 AM with the headline "California public employees disabled by COVID-19 could get tax-free pensions under proposal."