Roraback, who also is a candidate for the 5th District Republican congressional nomination, focused his remarks on "hazardous duty" employees such as police, correction officers and prison nurses — who get to retire after 20 years no matter what their age, with pensions amounting to half their top average salary in their three highest-paid years; overtime is included in the pension calculation. They get 70 percent of that salary average if they work 30 years.

Referring to disclosures in several Courant Government Watch columns from 2011, Roraback said, "When we read about [prison] nurses … who rack up overtime of $94,000 on top of a base pay of $105,000 — or when we read of the UConn police chief [announcing that he'll be] retiring with a salary of $255,000, and a deputy chief retiring with a salary of $200,000, do the math. … Four of the hazardous-duty employees who retired in this last [2011] wave of retirements are earning more … in their retirements [because of overtime-spiked salaries] than they did in their base pay."

Roraback said his bill would remove pensions from collective bargaining for employees hired after July 1, which means no existing workers' rights would be affected. He said state workers' pensions in New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island and Massachusetts are not set through collective bargaining. He said the GOP bill also would remove overtime and longevity payments from pension calculations for those employees, and would require them to be enrolled in 401(k) benefit plans.

He said the pension plan is woefully underfunded — "we're facing more than $71 billion in unfunded retiree obligations." And even though Malloy on Monday proposed adding another $125 million in funding for the pension plan, Roraback said, "better funding is not enough to get Connecticut out of the pickle we're in. … We have to change the rules with respect to our pensions."

He said the hazardous-duty employees are good, hard-working people, but the rules invite abuse. "The people that are gaming the system are not bad people. They're rational people, not bad people. We have a bad system. And what we're aiming to do is to make it a good system."

Malloy's senior adviser, Roy Occhiogrosso, said later Tuesday that "The Malloy Administration reached an agreement last year with state employees that will save Connecticut taxpayers $21.5 billion over 20 years. That agreement covers these issues, and Sen. Roraback knows that." He said the GOP idea is "not a real proposal."

Said Dorman: "Senator Roraback should be focused on making retirement security a possibility for more workers instead of taking away public employee pensions. State employees just made significant concessions to fix a problem caused by Republican governors kicking the can down the road on the state's financial obligations and then pointing the finger of blame at middle-class workers. His proposal to replace defined benefit pensions with 401(k)s is economically foolish and politically extreme for someone with aspirations to serve in Congress."