Officeholders can keep taking a public pension if they aren’t working for the branch of government that’s paying that benefit. Seven primary candidates, including O’Neill Burke, are getting retirement pay from past offices.
By Mitchell Armentrout and Tim Novak
Democrat Eileen O’Neill Burke as she was about to file petitions in December for the primary race for Cook County state’s attorney.
Eileen O’Neill Burke has a lot to lose — more than $211,000 a year — if she wins the March 19 Democratic primary race for Cook County state’s attorney and goes on to be elected to lead the office where she once worked.
O’Neill Burke now gets a monthly government pension of $17,633.78 before taxes and insurance costs. That’s based mostly on her years as an Illinois appellate judge but also in part on the decade she was an assistant state’s attorney.
The law doesn’t let officeholders collect pensions based even in part on past work for the same government agency. So O’Neill Burke would have to give up her pension for as long as she’d be in that office.
Bob Fioretti, a former Chicago City Council member who’s running unopposed in the Republican primary for state’s attorney, also now gets a government pension. But he’s in a different situation.
Fioretti’s two terms representing a Near West Side ward helped get him a $96,000-a-year pension. If elected to succeed State’s Attorney Kim Foxx, he wouldn’t have to give that up. That’s because his retirement benefits are for his City Hall service.
O’Neill Burke and Fioretti are among at least seven candidates in the March primary now collecting government pensions for past public service.
Former Ald. Bob Fioretti in December, after submitting his petitions to run for Cook County state’s attorney.
Whoever succeeds Foxx would get a $228,613 yearly salary.
That’s shy of the $234,775.44 O’Neill Burke was making before she stepped down from the bench last summer.
If O’Neill Burke ends up winning, she’d be able to again start taking her pension once she left office.
“If elected, Eileen will not and cannot draw a pension as the Cook County state’s attorney,” her campaign spokesperson says. “She stepped down from her role as an appellate court justice to run for this office because of her strong desire to serve and make the Cook County state’s attorney’s office one of the best and most well-run prosecutor’s offices in the country again.”
A spokesperson for Fioretti says he “will continue to receive any payments he is entitled to receive for his work as a civil servant and private attorney.”
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