Outside of retired police and firefighters, Detroit has 18,500 retirees currently collecting benefits from their pension plan. Orr is requesting docs from the pension plans, as we speak, because it had been assumed that the pension plans were the bright spot (ie fully funded). It turns out that, using his back of the napkin calculations, they are over $1 billion underfunded and the city will be forced to cough that up on top of what they have been shorting in payments to their own pension funds. There is no way to save it without a massive federal "gift" or bankruptcy. Unfortunately, with the current administration, I wouldn't rule out them dumping it on the taxpayers as a precedent with IL and CA coming up next...
When the initial numbers came out months ago of being 18 billion in the red, I think the total pension liabilities were way North of that....