Southern States Police Benevolent Association, Inc., et al. v. Govenor Robert H. Bentley et al.

Southern States Police Benevolent Association, Inc. ("SSPBA"), and three of its members, all of whom were employed as police officers by the City of Auburn (collectively, "plaintiffs"), sued Alabama Governor Robert Bentley and the other members of the Board of Control of the Employees' Retirement System of Alabama ("the ERSA"); David Bronner, the chief executive officer and secretary-treasurer of the Retirement Systems of Alabama ("the RSA") and the ERSA; and Thomas White, Jr., the State comptroller (referred to collectively as "the State defendants"), in their representative capacities. Plaintiffs sought injunctive relief and a judgment declaring that participants in the pension plan the ERSA operated could make retirement contributions and receive increased retirement benefits based upon their "earnable compensation," which term, the police plaintiffs argued, rightly included payments received for overtime worked. The trial court entered a summary judgment in favor of the State defendants, and the police plaintiffs appealed. The Supreme Court affirmed, because "earnable compensation" as defined in code section 36-27-1(14), was compensation received for working "the full normal work-time." The Court agreed with the State defendants that, before the amendment of 36- 27-1(14) in 2012, earnable compensation did not properly include overtime payments, regardless of the past practice of the ERSA. "Moreover, although the 2012 amendment to 36-27-1(14) allows overtime payments to be included within earnable compensation to a limited extent . . . we find no support in the language of the statute for the police plaintiffs' argument that the legislature intended to differentiate between mandatory overtime and voluntary overtime and to make mandatory overtime part of a member's annual base compensation and thus not subject to the 120 percent limit." View "Southern States Police Benevolent Association, Inc., et al. v. Govenor Robert H. Bentley et al." on Justia Law