Wellington would be remiss if he rubber-stamped pension

Sheriff Randall Wellington is being sued for not signing off on the disability retirement application of a deputy who has been indicted in Trumbull County on drug charges and fired by the sheriff for misconduct on duty.
Good for Wellington.
It's about time someone started taking disability retirement claims by public employees seriously. Certainly the Public Employee Retirement System can't be counted on to do so.
That's the same outfit that conducts all its business behind closed doors, doling out public money and refusing to discusses cases on the grounds of employee privacy.
PERS's most notorious rubber stamping of a disability pension, at least involving a local "retiree," was the pension it awarded to Andrew Polovischak, the crooked Youngstown Municipal Court judge. Polovischak received his first pension check right before he left for a federal penitentiary.
Polovischak pleaded guilty to accepting bribes and fixing cases April 4, 2000, but refused to resign from the bench, collecting a full paycheck for a month until the Ohio Supreme Court suspended him. In the meantime, he filed for a disability pension, which the PERS granted over the city's objections in July 2000.
Of course the PERS wouldn't say how much Polovischak got, but based on the salary of $94,500 a year he was collecting while he was selling justice and based on his years of "service," he could be getting as much as $70,000 a year for the rest of his life.
New case: Granted, the deputy, William Frease, would not be getting that kind of money. Also, Frease predicts that he will be found not guilty of the criminal charges and that the administrative charges used to fire him will be proven unfounded.
If so, so be it.
But in the meantime, Wellington is under no obligation to push Frease's retirement through.
Fraternal Order of Police lawyers say that forwarding the retirement form is a "ministerial act," implying that Wellington has no discretion. But one of the questions Wellington must answer is this: "Is the disabling condition the result of an ... injury or illness that occurred during or resulted from performance of duties under the direct supervision of a member's appoint authority?" Another is: "Do you believe the applicant is permanently incapacitated for the performance of his/her duties?"
The sheriff would not be doing his duty if he signed off on those questions without being given all of the information he needs to provide truthful answers. The sheriff should certainly investigate any possible correlation between when Frease found out that he was the subject of a criminal investigation and when he decided to retire.
History suggests that if Wellington doesn't ask the hard questions, no one in Columbus will.