"This has just got to stop," the mayor declared during the annual meeting attesting to the city's financial health attended by the governor, both the city and state comptrollers and other officials.
Bloomberg pointed to recent stories in The Post as evidence of how the system has spun out of control.
"A lot of you read stories in the newspaper about somebody who is a professional boxer or who runs a triathlon and they are out on a disability pension," the mayor said.
"A lot of those things -- I don't know about those two in particular -- come out of these presumption bills, which sounds like they're perfectly reasonable. But the bottom line is we cannot afford to automatically assume that anybody who is sick was made sick by their government service."
The Post spotlighted retired FDNY Lt. John McLaughlin, who competes in marathons and triathlons while collecting an $86,000 tax-free disability pension for lung disease.
Firefighter John Giuffrida collects a three-quarters disability pension worth $74,624 a year while competing in Thai kick-boxing matches.
Giuffrida's career-ending diagnoses: lung disease and post-traumatic stress disorder, apparently brought on by spending 30 days at Ground Zero after the 9/11 attacks.
A bill enacted by the Legislature "presumes" that any firefighter who develops lung or heart diseases, cancer, a stroke or a 9/11 illness became ill as a result of the job.
Bloomberg warned that the city's pension bills are exploding so rapidly that, at some point, there will be a crisis.
"I can tell you it will get resolved," he said. "We will at some point literally get to the cliff and not be able to go over it and not be able to go any further."
The mayor's position was in tandem with that of the three private members of the control board. Speaking for all three, Jeffrey Halis, a veteran financial executive, urged the city and state to address the increasingly explosive issue of "unfettered" growth in pension, health-care and debt-service costs.
"Promises are being made to city employees without the funding or budgetary accommodations necessary to back them up," Halis said.
The city's pension tab this year is projected at $7.5 billion in a $63 billion budget, about 13 percent higher than last year.
Halis also fired a shot across the bow of Albany, echoing the mayor by warning that higher taxes on the rich will drive them out of the state and "may in fact cause lower revenues than anticipated."
Republished with permission of The New York Post.
