Pension Pains: States Cut Benefits to Skirt Massive Funding Shortfall

Apr. 26, 2010 — -- Dan Montgomery doesn't have many kind words for his elected officials. The high school English teacher from Skokie says Illinois politicians spent years neglecting their obligations to the state's public pension funds and now want workers to foot the bill.

"It's terrible," said Montgomery, who has been teaching for 17 years.

Illinois recently cut benefits and raised retirement ages for public employees in order to cover a $78 billion shortfall in its public pension fund.

"We really fought it, but in the end they did it anyway," Montgomery said.

States around the country are beginning to face the necessity of reforming their public pension systems, after the financial crisis took a bite out of already inadequate savings and put a seemingly insurmountable gap between assets and the benefits that governments had promised their workers.

Illinois is one of the most recent states to tackle its shortfalls, with a reform that the government says is expected to save taxpayers more than $200 billion over 35 years.

Overall, the nation's public pension funds face a $728 billion shortfall, which means that they only have enough money to cover benefits for 13 years if they continue making payments at the current rate, according to data from the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College. However, some pension funds are in much worse shape. Before the reform for example, the Illinois Employee Retirement Service only had enough money to cover the next six and a half years.

Government representatives emphasize that no current retiree risks losing retirement benefits as a result of the crisis, but they concede that something will have to be done to plug the gap before coffers run dry.

"It's obviously a very serious financial management issue," said Scott Pattison, executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers. "If this is not dealt with, we will get to the point where states are going to have to put a heck of a lot of general taxpayer money into pension funds."

Public employee groups, however, are not happy and some have threatened to withdraw their support for elected officials in the November elections.

Ed Geppert, president of the Illinois Teachers Federation, said his group was "deeply disappointed" by the reforms.

"This new law will do grave and long-lasting harm to the state of Illinois' ability to attract and retain highly qualified teachers and public employees," he said in a press release. The law "shifts the burden of the state's past mistakes onto future teachers and public employees."