Posted on 10/18/2019 6:11:53 PM PDT by george76
East St. Louis is short $9.5 million between a budget deficit and back payments owed to its fire and police pensions. As a result, city leaders are closing a firehouse and laying off nine firefighters.
Nine firefighters have been asked to hand in their gear and their fire station will temporarily close as East St. Louis, Illinois, faces a $5.5 million budget deficit and interception of nearly $4 million in state funding for debts owed to its police and fire pensions.
Unfortunately, with 100% of the City’s state revenues being redirected to the police and fire pensions, we are faced with the difficult task of strategically reducing some services in order to continue to meet our financial obligations
...
The firefighters pension was only 9% funded at the end of 2018, with an unfunded liability of $65.2 million
...
the city once had nine stations and 120 firefighters. By Nov. 1 there will be two firehouses and 28 firefighters
...
East St. Louis was given a riverboat casino license to rescue it from bankruptcy in the 1990s, along with decades of state financial oversight to control its spending.
East St. Louis has seen decades of population loss and now has over 26,000 residents, with 43% of them living below the poverty line. It has the highest murder rate of any U.S. city.
East St. Louis is the fourth Illinois city to face state funding interception since pension systems were first allowed to seek that remedy in 2018, Pallasch said. The others are Harvey, North Chicago and Chicago.
...
While the combined pension debt for Illinois’ five statewide funds is officially estimated at nearly $137 billion, Moody’s Investors Service just pegged the debt at $241 billion, using less rosy estimates of future investment returns.
(Excerpt) Read more at illinoispolicy.org ...
The ponzi scheme begins to collapse.
One of the worst places in America.
Similar to Gary, Indiana.
Just wait for these vaunted "public safety" hero fire fighters to go around starting fires. This is how government employees behave. They've done this before.
A rational person, given a choice of terminating a firefighter or a mere politician would instantly choose the person of no worth.
But, instead, the firefighter gets the axe. Methinks firefighters should have a rule: we protect real people, buttwipes can fight there friggin’ fires themselves.
In the Army we were told where to find sympathy, in the dictionary right between sh!t and syphilis.
These pensions were put in place under local and state schemes, the Federal Government has no responsibility to bail out these pie in the sky vote buying schemes.
Oops, an anger-based misspell.
“There” = “Their”
I have really had enough of liberals. When will we make this end?
East St. Louis is the anus of Illinois.
L
“buttwipes can fight there friggin’ fires themselves.”
Letting East St. Louis burn down would be classified as urban renewal.
L
The 1990s??.....Now truthfully.....Who could have ever seen this coming......./s
Murder rate E Stl in 2017 => 111/100k population.
Chhicago in 2017 => 24/100k.
Loser lier.
In the old days, you put in your time, then retired at half-pay. By then your home was paid off, and your kids were - hopefully - out on their own.
But then the local governments started using crazy multiplier formulas to determine pensions. So now it is very common for an employee to retire at full pay, or even more.
And to make things even more interesting, most state constitutions prohibit reducing public pensions. So it’s either change the state constitutions, or...heck, I don’t know what.
All the useless gov workers to lay off, and they layoff firefighters.
I’m betting those in six figured admin positions are just fine.
That’s “liar”, not “lier”. FYI.
Loser Liar.
I grew up near there and remember when it had 70,000 people and, although it had problems, it was at least functional. My first job in 1973 was in downtown East St. louis. My father bought two new cars from a downtown dealer, both times in the evening after he got off from work. We always drove through ESL to go to and from places north of it. Decades of corrupt government, mismanagement, loss of business and industry, growing crime, and welfare state dependency did it in. Some years ago a man was injured on city property. He sued and, because the city didn’t have insurance or the money to pay him, the court awarded him the deed to city hall.
What are you going to burn ? A substantial chunk of the city is empty grass fields where houses and buildings used to be. Over 2/3rds of its residents from its zenith are gone.
This !
East St Louis is 98 percent black and has the highest murder rate in the USA.
“In 2013, the per capita homicide rate in East St. Louis was about 18 times the national average,[32] and had the highest homicide rate of any city in the United States”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_St._Louis,_Illinois
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.