A $503,000 Public Pension from Westchester, paid for by Taxpayers, is Outrageous
By Dan Murphy
Meet Kara Bennorth-Hubertus, left, a retired employee of Westchester Health Care Corp., who, according to the Empire Center (empirecenter.org), is the highest pensioner from Westchester County.
According to new data posted on SeeThroughNY.net, the Empire Center’s government transparency website, Bennorth-Hubertus, is receiving a pension of $ 503,128.
Thanks to the good work of EmpireCenter.org for highlighting the fact that 97 new retirees to the NYS Local Retirement System are eligible for pensions of $200,000 or more. And out of those 97 retirees, 11 are from Westchester.
“The 480,393 pensioners of the state’s retirement system were eligible to receive $15.6 billion in pensions during the fiscal year 2025, up twenty-five percent since 2020 ($12.6 billion). Of these pensioners, 11,384 were eligible to receive more than $100,000 – a ten percent increase from the previous year.
“Like the previous year, the largest eligible pension went to Kara Bennorth, a former communications executive at the Westchester Health Care Corporation, who was eligible to collect $503,128 – more than half of which came from an excess benefit plan. Bennorth is the first person to qualify for a pension above $500,000 since the Empire Center started collecting the data in 2008.
“Of the 12,928 newly retired full-career members—defined as those with at least 20 years of service—1,272 were police officers and firefighters in New York’s Police and Fire Retirement System (PFRS), who were eligible for an average pension of $98,011. In contrast, the rest of the 11,875 new retirees from the state’s Employees Retirement System (ERS) averaged less than half the PFRS amount, at $46,796.More than fifty percent of the new retirees eligible to receive six-figure pensions were from PFRS, although they represent less than ten percent of the most recent cohort of NYSLRS pensioners.
“The full data set can be found on SeeThroughNY.net, and the new data includes names and allowable pension amounts for 480,393 retirees from state agencies, public authorities, and local governments, as well as non-teaching school district positions. The amounts, which are exempt from state income tax, show what retirees were eligible to collect during the plan’s 2025 fiscal year, which ended March 31,” writes EmpireCenter.org.
The other 10 Westchester retirees with a pension of more than $200,000 per year are.
Patricia Ariel, Westchester Health Care Corp $233,057
David Billig, Westchester Health Care Corp. $ $227,045
Edward Stolzenberg, Westchester Health Care Corp. $ $225,941
John Folkerts, City of Yonkers, $213,595
Charles Mulcahey, City of Yonkers, $ 210.168
Brian Menton, City of Yonkers, $209,377
Frank Cariello, City of Yonkers, $209 274
Kallid Nassar, City of Yonkers, $206 838
Ed Leahy, City of Yonkers, $201,314
Thomas Wood, Town of Cortlandt, $200,046
Ronald Romano, City of Yonkers, $200,005.
