State game wardens, other Group C officers press lawmakers on pay-step inequity; committee adopts resolution 3-2

Members of the Vermont Senate Government Operations Committee on Feb. 28 heard hours of testimony about long-standing pay-step and retirement inequities for law-enforcement and firefighter employees classified in the state’s Group C retirement system, and voted 3-2 to advance a committee-sponsored resolution to pursue draft legislation and further review.

Kelly Price, senior state game warden with the Vermont Warden Service, told the committee that wardens and other non-Vermont State Police (VSP) Group C employees are “unfairly subsidized” by the structure of their pay and retirement systems. Price said those employees are on a slower step-pay schedule tied to a 20-year retirement window and “must work over 10 years longer” in some cases to reach the same step progress troopers do under a faster schedule. “We were promised parity decades ago and they never came,” Price said.

The disparity is not, Price and other witnesses said, primarily a recruitment or retention problem but a parity issue tied to how step progression interacts with the retirement system. Price described one bargaining offer his group made — an 18-year step progression, a two-year pause on cost-of-living adjustments and a two-year pause on reclassifications — that…