The Akers age waiver train pulls out of Senate Station. Next stop, Governor’s office. (WMP&I)

Five months after the Springfield City Council and Mayor Domenic Sarno forwarded an age waiver for now-Police Superintendent Lawrence Akers, the bill has finally passed Beacon Hill. What is moving to Governor Maura Healey’s desk is not what city officials passed in February. Nevertheless, it will accomplish the home rule petition’s longstanding goal: allowing Akers to serve until age 70.

Massachusetts requires public safety employees to retire at age 65. Waivers to age 70 are common but require legislative approval. Waiver bills usually freeze the pensions at whatever the individual would receive if retiring at age 65. After councilors brought this to Akers’s attention, the city passed a home rule petition without the cap. Months later, the legislature moved the bill, but only after restoring the cap.

“I am proud to join my colleagues in the Springfield delegation to pass this home rule petition and cement Larry Akers’ appointment as Superintendent of the Springfield Police Department,” Springfield Senator Adam Gomez said Wednesday in a release.

“I look forward to collaborating with Superintendent Akers and the Springfield Police Department on our shared vision of keeping our community safe and rebuilding an enduring trust between the police and the community in the City of Springfield,” he continued.

The age waiver home rule petition sans pension cap had arrived on Beacon Hill on March 14 when Springfield Rep Bud Williams filed it. It did not exit the Public Service Committee until June 24, an unusual lapse of time for routine legislation. It also only escaped committee, and only after redrafting. The bill, redrafted with the cap, would take another month before it finally passed the House this past Monday. Senate passage, which Gomez’s release announced, came two days later.

A spokesperson for Healey did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, absent a constitutional issue, there is little reason to believe she will block it.

The slowdown arose because state pension regulators objected to removing the cap—and the Public Service Committee concurred.

A happier, less bureaucratically fraught  moment between Sarno & Akers. (via Springfield City Hall)

Notably, Springfield got it right in its first draft of the home rule petition. The bill was part of a larger legislative package Sarno was pushing through the Council as part of Akers’s appointment as the city’s top cop. Those other components, which would gut the police commission’s power permanently, drew far more attention. Still, councilors pointed the cap out to Akers during a meeting last winter—even heatedly arguing amongst themselves about whether the bill would limit Akers’s retirement benefit.

Akers was shocked to learn the age waiver would affect his pension. He said he would look into it, but did not object to that initial draft’s passage.

However, it never got to Beacon Hill. Amid the broader controversy, Sarno introduced a new age waiver home rule petition without the cap. Reading from a terse email the executive director of the Springfield Retirement Board sent his chief of staff, Sarno implied that state regulators blessed the new bill.

They had not. Minutes for the Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission’s March 13 meeting state that staff could not recall an age waiver that let an officer contribute to the system—and thus earn a larger retirement benefit—beyond age 65.

Akers does not turn 65 until December so there was no rush in one sense. However, the bill’s inertia stood out, especially as the committee moved much more quickly to send other public safety age waivers out into the legislative world. In an email to WMP&I last month, Akers did not comment on the legislation. However, he acknowledged he would have to retire if it did not move.

Did the legislature get around the Home Rule amendment by cutting out the middle man, er, municipality? (WMP&I)

In the end, the Public Safety Committee just reversed the changes Springfield made. Such changes to home rule petitions are rare. The state constitution limits how much Beacon Hill can legislate for individual municipalities without extraordinary measures.

Usually, the legislature sends changes back to the petitioning municipality. That did not happen here. The Committee indicated to WMP&I last month that it was not necessary. It may be that the legislation was not actually about the City of Springfield. Rather, it is about one Lawrence Akers and, indirectly, the Springfield Retirement Board. The latter is a distinct corporate entity created by the state and not a municipality.

Fundamentally, this slice of governmental arcana pertains to little outside a recurring but not unique debate about public employee pensions.

However, this was all part of a larger episode, the reverberations of which continue. First, it suggests that either the Sarno administration did not know about the implications of appointing a top cop near retirement or they did not bother to inform Akers about them.

Second, there are political implications.

Gomez had forced the mayor into a compromise on Sarno’s Police Commission ordinance. He did this, in part, by threatening to block Akers’s age waiver in the Senate. As originally written, the ordinance would have codified the mayor’s illegal transferal of powers from the Police Commission to the superintendent. The compromise blessed that transfer, but only for the length of Akers’s superintendency.

Gomez and Williams, co-sponsors of convenience, but no more? (WMP&I)

The age waiver’s winding road to passage aside, the city’s political crisis seemed over once the Council passed the compromise legislation in February. However, Gomez’s willingness to play hardball with the mayor to save the Commission may have contributed to Ward 4 City Councilor Malo Brown’s decision to challenge Gomez in the September 3 Democratic primary. Brown is also an aide to Rep Williams.

Williams is himself facing a challenge from educator Johnnie McKnight, whom Gomez endorsed this week.

Right now, the incumbents have the advantage in both of these races. Still, it was the mayor’s legislative push in February that ostensibly inflamed this year’s primary in Springfield.

Sarno’s choice of Akers to lead Pearl Street drew wide acclaim. Yet, the irony should be lost on no one that this led to a mayoral attempt at a power grab that itself may continue to ripple through city politics for months after the primary.