Pension costs: Pushing cities to fiscal disaster
By San Jose Mayor Chuck Reed & Santa Ana Mayor Miguel Pulido, The San Diego Union-Tribune
The skyrocketing cost of public employee retirement benefits is one of the greatest challenges facing cities and other government agencies across California today. Annual taxpayer contributions to CalPERS, the state’s main retirement system, have jumped from about $2 billion to nearly $8 billion over the past decade. Many non-CalPERS agencies have seen similar retirement cost increases as well.
Despite these rising contributions, the state’s retirement systems are significantly underfunded, with their collective unfunded liabilities for pension and retiree health care benefits totaling hundreds of billions of dollars. Continue reading