Simmons, a former CTA capital budget director, who paid a total of $27,652 to buy two additional years of CTA service and to have the five years he worked in state government included in his total service time.The top-paid supplemental pensioners include: Between the start of 2000 and the end of 2014, CTA contributions to the supplemental plan totaled $93.8 million, according to the agency’s financial statements.ĭuring that time, the cost of an L ride has risen from $1.50 to $2.25 and bus fare has gone up from $1.50 to $2. To retire early under the changes made to the supplemental plan in 2008, CTA executives had to pay varying sums out of their own pockets to buy years of service and, in many cases, to “bridge” their years of service from other government jobs, records show.īut their contributions were small compared to what the publicly funded transit agency has paid toward their pensions and those of other senior-level staff. Most of their pension income came from the Retirement Plan for CTAĮmployees, the main pension fund for transit workers, into which the CTA has paid nearly $1.8 billion over 15 years. Seventy percent of the supplemental retirees - 341 - were paid less than $10,000 each, in line with the plan’s original intent of providing them with modest payments on top of their regular CTA pensions. They include Lynn Sapyta, who retired at 53 and went on to work for five years for the College of DuPage before being fired from her $159,000-a-year job along with other school administrators over allegations of financial mismanagement. Simmons, retired the same month he turned 55 and now has a six-figure job with Metra.Īnother, Dennis Anosike, retired at 49 and now makes more than $200,000 a year working for the public bus and rail system in Washington, D.C.Īnother 37 people received pension payments in 2014 of between $50,000 and $100,000 apiece. Seven of the supplemental-plan retirees collected pensions totaling more than $100,000 each in 2014, records show. Brown, who’s now the chief financial officer in Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration - changed the supplemental plan in 2008 to allow dozens of those employees to retire early. Originally intended to supplement CTA executives’ regular pensions with modest additional benefits, the CTA board - then chaired by Carole L.

Nearly 500 former transit executives or their survivors collected a total of more than $7 million from the “CTA supplemental retirement plan” in 2014, the most recent year for which records were available. The Chicago Transit Authority has spent nearly $94 million over 15 years on a retirement program that has allowed former CTA executives to start collecting lucrative pensions in their late 40s and early 50s while also getting paychecks from other government jobs, a Better Government Association/Chicago Sun-Times investigation has found.

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