PROVIDENCE — At least 48 retired state workers, teachers and judges who left government service in the last two decades have pensions that now pay them between $100,528 and $190,352 a year.

With years of 3-percent annual cost-of-living increases, some are receiving pensions that pay them far more than the salary they made when they were still working.

All but one of the 20 top-paying pensions go to retired judges.

But the list of six-digit pensioners also includes a Providence special-education teacher with a $119,789 annual pension, a former Woonsocket school superintendent with a $127,595 pension, the 49-year-old former head of the Rhode Island State Police with a $102,601 pension, a one-time state education commissioner getting a $124,032 pension after only seven years work in Rhode Island, and a recently retired court magistrate who crossed the $100,000 threshold by counting decades of part-time work, municipal appointments and an after-school job as a State House doorkeeper.

One out of every six of these top pension checks goes to Florida.

Some of those with the biggest pensions have returned to the public payroll as fill-in judges, while still collecting their $100,000-plus pensions.

They include former Rhode Island Supreme Court Justice Frank J. Williams who has returned to the bench almost daily since he retired in late December, getting $112.83 a day — for a total of $11,170 — in addition to his $138,306-a-year pension.

Other retired judges who have returned to work include Robert K. Pirraglia, who has received an additional $1,864.90 on top of his $109,985 pension; John E. Orton, who has been paid $4,927.10 in addition to his $117,050 pension; Mark A. Pfeiffer, who has received $474.96 on top of his $123,490 pension; John M. McLoughlin, who has made $15,542.76 on top of his $118,855 pension, and Richard J. Israel, who has been paid $578.85 on top of his $155,801.

Depending on their age and years on the bench, some judges retire with pensions equal to 100 percent of their pay. They don’t get extra if they return to the bench. The opportunity to get paid for returning to the bench is limited to those who only worked long enough to qualify for pensions equal to 75 percent of their pay. They get per diem payments equal to the difference between their pensions and what they would be paid if they were full-time judges today.

These top pensions are the exceptions, of course.

The pensions paid the overwhelming majority of the 25,689 retired state workers, municipal employees and public school teachers are far below $100,000. The average pension paid a retired state employee is $27,110 and retired public school teacher, $42,944, according to state retirement director Frank Karpinski, who compiled the list of $100,000-plus pensioners at The Journal’s request.

But some retirees get far more, including former judges who were exempt from contributing to their pensions unless they took the bench after 1989. With a $190,352 pension, the former chief justice of the Supreme Court, Joseph R. Weisberger, is the state’s highest paid pensioner. His retired Supreme Court colleague Donald F. Shea is next in line with a $170,385 pension.

The cost of the state’s pension system has been a major issue in the effort to resolve Rhode Island’s dire financial problems. In an effort to save millions of dollars, lawmakers are considering dramatic changes in the defined-benefit plans that pay state workers and public school teachers up to 80 percent –– and judges up to 100 percent –– in retirement, plus guaranteed cost-of-living increases.

Various options were discussed at a General Assembly hearing Friday. State workers pleaded with lawmakers to keep current plans intact. But with the projected taxpayer cost approaching $1 billion by 2017, Rep. Timothy Williamson, chairman of a House study commission, said the state must take steps to rein in its pension costs.

Some of the state’s six-figure pensioners actually worked for 30 years or more — a standard in private industry — before getting the maximum pension benefits the state gives its longtime employees.

Dr. Alfredo Cassiet, the former medical program director for the state General Hospital, worked for the state for 30 years, three months and 22 days before he retired in 1988 with a pension that in the early-1990s was paying him $60,094. With automatic annual increases, his pension today is $102,303.

John Biancuzzo, 67, retired Dec. 30, 2004, with an unusually large pension for a Providence special-education teacher, a pension that five years later pays him $119,789. Only a handful of state retirees — most of them state judges and long-serving state agency directors — get more in Rhode Island.

But his circumstances were also unusual for a public school teacher.

When he retired after a 36-year career, he was making a $73,478 salary, according to Mark Dunham, chief financial officer for the Providence schools. But Biancuzzo was paid extra for teaching special education, working an extra class period each day and a 230-day school year, when the average Providence teacher works 181 days.

He was also paid extra for each student beyond the maximum six special-education students allowed in each class by a state policy that resulted from an earlier arbitrator’s ruling. For Biancuzzo, that alone translated into an additional $55,312 his last year in the Providence school system.

Biancuzzo, who now works at the private East Bay Career Academy, says he was “shocked” to find out how big a pension he would get, because the money was going in one pocket and out the other, with two children headed for college and then graduate school. But he said even he can’t justify — or defend — the extra money he was paid for having extra students in his classroom. “They weren’t discipline problems. They were beautiful children,” so “it does not make sense to me at all,” he said in an interview last week.

By the time Biancuzzo retired, he was entitled to the maximum pension benefit, which in his case was 80 percent of his final $137,030 three-year salary average which — with annual 3-percent, compounded increases — has made him the state’s 27th highest state pensioner.

Others bought their way in, courtesy of a relic of Rhode Island history: the special pension bill.

The beneficiary of one such pension bill was J. Troy Earhart, commissioner of elementary and secondary education in Rhode Island for seven years. A 1988 bill allowed him to make a one-time payment of $160,916 that bought him credit for 26 years, 9 months and 25 days that he worked in the Dade County, Fla., school system and then as a school superintendent in Foxboro, Mass., for which he was already receiving a pension.

That one-time payment bought him a $76,000 Rhode Island pension, which has grown since his 1991 retirement to $124,032. His monthly pension check — which is 135 percent of what he was making when he still lived and worked in Rhode Island — gets mailed to an address in Eustis, Fla. Attempts to reach him last week were unsuccessful.

While some lawmakers still make the occasional stab at winning passage of a special pension bill, the practice effectively ended on April 24, 1991, when Superior Court Judge Robert Krause lifted the secrecy surrounding pension records in response to a union’s appeal of then-Governor Bruce Sundlun’s vow to open the records.

In what remains one of the most dramatic victories for open-records advocates, Krause wrote: “This court detects no persuasive reason…. why people benefiting from public funds will have their right to privacy invaded simply by disclosing records which demonstrate the manner in which they receive public funds.”

Some recent retirees are benefiting from laws that, at one time, allowed them to amass full years of credit toward their state pensions for appointments to municipal boards that met once or twice a month, and other part-time positions. Retired Superior Court Magistrate Joseph A. Keough is one such case,

After 11 years as a magistrate and a one-year stint as a lawyer in the state treasurer’s office in the late 1980s, Keough retired on Dec. 31, 2008, with a $102,411 annual pension.

He could have retired with a judicial pension that paid him 75 percent of his highest three-year salary average.

But Keough, now 69, had more than enough years of credit under earlier pension rules to qualify for the larger, 80-percent pension paid a full-time state employee after 35 years of work. That boosted his pension by about $10,000 a year.

In fact, his pension file reflects more than 40 years of “credited service.”

That includes his two years (1966-67) as an alternate member of the Pawtucket Zoning Board of Review, six years as a member of the Pawtucket Board of Canvassers. With one hiatus during the administration of former Pawtucket Mayor Brian Sarault, he was also a twice-a-week judge on the Pawtucket municipal court from 1973 to 1994. As chief judge of the court he made $346 a week.

Asked last week how often canvassing board members work, Pawtucket personnel director Angel Garcia conveyed this message from the city registrar: “They are appointed board members. They meet once a month. They are required to be available all day on election/primary days every other year and be available for special meetings called by the chair.’ ” In an e-mail last week, Keough recalled meeting “a minimum of two, three times per month as elections mandated.”

In 1987, Keough bought credit for an additional six years of pension credit. That included the six months of credit he purchased for his Jan. 14—Feb. 27, 1963, service in the Navy. The one-time cost: $30.

Another $547 one-time payment bought him five full years of credit for the after-school hours he spent as a doorkeeper in the House of Representatives.

His file contains an affidavit from former Pawtucket Rep. Joseph Capineri attesting to the fact that Keough, during his senior year at St. Raphael’s Academy and four years at Providence College “served as a doorkeeper during legislative sessions” from 1958-62.

In the years since Keough amassed these years of pension credit, state law has changed.

No one is allowed any longer to buy credit for more time than they actually served in the military. Since 1994, there has been a minimum 20-hour-a-week work requirement for pension credit. That same year, lawmakers repealed the pension provision that recognized the part-time, six–month-a-year legislative clerks and doorkeepers as full-time state employees for pension purposes.

kgregg@projo.com