Taking advantage of a little-known early-retirement incentive offered by the CTA, Carter left his second stint with the agency in 2009 and started collecting a $137,229-a-year pension the same month he turned 52, records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times and Better Government Association show.
Carter didn’t retire, though. He moved to Washington, D.C., to take a post as a top lawyer in President Barack Obama’s U.S. Department of Transportation, where he would rise to the post of acting chief of staff, making $146,450 a year.
Double-dipping as a federal government official while also collecting a pension from the CTA allowed Carter to take home a combined taxpayer-subsidized income that reached $283,679 a year, records show.
Now 57, Carter collected $754,762 in pension payouts between November 2009 and this April, when he accepted Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s offer to return to the CTA for his third stint there, this time as its $235,000-a-year boss.
His salary — which the CTA says is in line with other big-city mass-transit system chiefs — is $20,000 a year more than his predecessor, Forrest Claypool, made. Claypool is now Emanuel’s chief of staff.
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