As Robert Lopatka was dying of colon cancer, the retired DuPage County school
superintendent took steps to ensure his new bride would be financially set for
life.
Lopatka opted to give his wife not one but two death benefits from the Illinois
Teachers' Retirement System -- a rare perk, used by fewer than 1 percent of
retired teachers.
Now, six years after the west suburban school administrator's death, his wife
gets the richest death benefits of any widow in any Illinois government pension
plan -- in part because her late husband got end-of-career raises meant to
inflate his state pension.
Beverly Lopatka's two death benefits total $260,000 a year -- about $95,000 more
than her husband's pension paid, and $100,000 more than any other widow in
Illinois gets from a government pension.
She also gets her own state pension, which pays her $79,954 a year as a retired
home economics teacher in her late husband's school district.
In all, Beverly Lopatka, 66, gets $340,857 a year from the Teachers' Retirement
System -- more than anyone else in the system, which is the state's largest
government pension plan. And her benefits automatically rise 3 percent every
year.
"I'm really not comfortable talking about that,'' Lopatka said in a brief phone
interview from her home in Battle Ground, Wash. "It was my husband's pension. He
and his advisers set that up. I'm just the recipient. It was obviously always a
risk, like any other investment."
At a time when most private employers no longer offer pensions and people's
401(k) retirement savings have been battered by the recession, Lopatka said she
knows how her rich pension checks look: "This is something that sticks out like
a big sore thumb to some people.''
As superintendent of DuPage District 88, Robert Lopatka was in charge of two
high schools -- Addison Trail and Willowbrook. During his final four years
there, the school board began raising his salary to inflate his state pension, a
common practice among suburban Chicago school districts that helps them attract
administrators while spreading the cost of their resulting big pensions to
taxpayers statewide.
A few months before he retired, Lopatka married the former Beverly Harvison, one
of his recently retired teachers, in January 2001. He then made sure she'd end
up with a rich pension after his death, partly by setting up what's called a
"reversionary annuity" -- a rarely used benefit, usually taken by someone who's
dying because, for them, it can provide their survivors with twice as much
money.
"TRS did know that Mr. Lopatka was dying when he elected to take a reversionary
annuity," said Eva Goltermann, a spokeswoman for the teacher pension plan. "TRS
does not have the authority under state law to deny members a reversionary
annuity, even if they're dying.''
Only 188 of the 325,000 members of the Teachers' Retirement System have signed
up for the perk.
To fund the reversionary annuity for his wife, Lopatka agreed to reduce his
state pension by about 12 percent.
Two years after he retired, Lopatka died from colon cancer on March 6, 2003. He
was 57.
His widow gets half of his pension -- which has now grown to $99,104 a year,
thanks to annual 3 percent cost-of-living increases -- plus the annuity, which
pays $161,799.
Since her husband died, she has been paid more than $1.6 million in death
benefits -- triple the $536,249 Lopatka contributed to his pension and the
annuity.
Between her own pension and her husband's death benefits, Lopatka has been paid
more than $2.2 million by the Teachers' Retirement System.