Opinion ID: 1156349
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 3

Heading: Full-time equals part-time

Text: The lid on Pandora's box has been ripped asunder, and the hand of rhetoric has reached in and taken the skeletal form of the Public Employees Retirement System to be the new skeletal form of the Judicial Retirement System. But, alas, why stop there? If full benefit of the retroactive governmental service was to benefit those who were rewriting the Judicial Retirement System, it was necessary to graft another appendage to the skeletal form, having to do with the definition of full-time and part-time service. Note 37 of Dostert points out that the legislature, by statute defined full-time employees to include members of the State Legislature, the clerk of the House of Delegates, the clerk of the State Senate, members of the legislative body of any political subdivision, and judges of the State Court of Claims. These are employees elected or appointed for definite terms. The majority used that grant as a basis for granting full credit to judges in the judicial pension system for part-time service to the State or a political subdivision. This application of the doctrine of beneficial transferability goes far beyond even the statute from which it is borrowed. This Court in Campbell v. Kelly, 157 W.Va. 453, 202 S.E.2d 369 (1974) had reviewed the Public Employees Retirement System as it applied to the West Virginia legislature. In doing so they struck out several special benefits the legislators provided for themselves. [26] The Court did not, however, strike down the provision of one year's credit for one year's elected service or one year's tenure service. Because certain elected and appointed non-executive branch officers and employees are granted a full year's credit service without actually working the necessary sixteen days of a month for ten months in any one year to qualify for a year's credited service, the Court in Dostert granted all members of the judiciary full-time credit for any part-time service. That is utter nonsense. None of those tenured non-executive branch officers and employees who received full-time credit for so-called part-time service under the Public Employees Retirement System got a year's credit when they worked two months as a clerk of a legislative committee, worked part-time for an administrative agency of the executive, or worked part-time for a political subdivision prior to election or appointment to the tenured class, or after leaving the tenured class. Further, if the grant of credit was special legislation, that evil would be better cured by restricting credit for legislative service to actual time served, than by extending credit for a myriad of part-time positions bearing no relation to judiciary service. There is no rationale, no logic, that says certain non-executive elective officers granted a full year's credit for elective term applies in any manner to the judicial branch of government. A legislator receives no full-year credit for part-time governmental service performed prior to his election or performed after he leaves legislative service. [27] The justices of this Court granted themselves a right that no other person had.