NEW HAVEN — The vote Thursday to approve a pension for another disgraced cop was ceremonial, a fact not lost on a police commissioner who nonetheless voted against it.

By a 5-1 margin, the police and fire pension board Thursday approved a $58,000 annual retirement benefit for Detective Clarence Willoughby, leading Richard Epstein, the chairman of the Board of Police Commissioners who also sits on the pension panel, to question why they even bothered taking up the issue, as they couldn’t reject it if they had wanted to.

“The issue is: If the firefighter and/or police officer’s retirement is official upon putting in the (pension) papers, then what are we voting on and why should we vote?” said Epstein, who cast the dissenting ballot.

“It was as much to raise the question, and raise the point that our vote was meaningless,” he said later.

Why not, he asked, just put age annuity retirements on the agenda as an informational item but not vote?

That’s fine with Fire Department Lt. James Kottage, chairman of the pension board, which is composed of police and fire union officials and members of the police and fire boards.

The group had caught some flak last year when it approved an unpopular $91,000 annual pension for Lt. William White after he was charged by the FBI, then made the pension retroactive to the day he put in his papers, two days after his March 2007 arrest.

The act of voting, Kottage said, implies the ability to deny the benefit, which they don’t have the right to do under the union contracts when the person has enough years on the job. A disability pension, such as the one secured by former Detective Justen Kasperzyk, is a different matter and needs to be scrutinized and approved. Kasperzyk was arrested with White last year and, like his former boss, has pleaded guilty to federal corruption counts.

Willoughby was charged in state court after an unrelated internal affairs probe into theft from the department’s confidential informants fund. He has denied any wrongdoing.

Willoughby was arrested Feb. 6 in the theft of thousands of dollars from the informants fund. The police board was preparing for a termination hearing when an arbitration award for White stripped the commission of its ability to discipline cops accused of wrongdoing when they filed for retirement first. The city had argued that retirements aren’t official until the pension board votes and that the police board had the authority to decide how an employee is separated from the department. The arbitrator ruled in favor of White, concluding a retirement is official on the effective date selected by the employee when he or she submits retirement papers.