Free Republic

The City of Oakland is in such dire financial straits that it is planning to use $2.9 million from state gas tax revenues to keep the city’s lights on, rather than using the money to fix pothole-riddled roads, for which the funding was intended. The San Francisco Chronicle reported Wednesday that the city is facing severe financial shortfalls, despite a booming economy that has seen wealthier households relocate from San Francisco across the bay to gentrifying neighborhoods. The problem is that the city’s costs are rising faster than its growing revenues, thanks partly to pension obligations — an increasingly common...

In a reminder of the extent and reality of California’s pension problem, the state’s six-figure pension club has more doubled since 2012. ... the number of retirees from the California Public Employees’ Retirement System who received pensions worth $100,000 or more rose from 14,760 in 2012 to 30,969 in 2018. average pension for full-career state employees enrolled in the plan for non-public safety workers was $63,057. For full-career state retirees enrolled in the plan for safety members, the average pension in 2018 was $84,197. For those working for local government employers, the average pension for regular employees was $74,599 in...

For each active worker, four pensioners. For 169 governmental bodies, the numbers are lopsided. In some cases hundreds — and in Chicago’s case, thousands — more retirees are drawing from a fund than active workers are paying into it. Even in a small suburban district such as the Arlington Heights Park District, 432 retirees are pulling from that district’s pension fund with only 103 active employees paying into it. In the city of Chicago, according to the treasurer’s numbers, the gap is smaller in percentage terms, but in terms of the gap, more dramatic. Including Chicago Board of Education administrative...

The second-longest bull market in American history hasn’t stopped the deterioration of state and local pension funds, whose unfunded debt has almost quadrupled—by their own accounting—from about $360 billion in 2007 to $1.4 trillion today. Having relied on overly optimistic and inaccurate financial assumptions for decades, public pension administrators are now forced to acknowledge that the systems owe much more than previously thought. Even as local governments struggle to pay for this debt, it keeps growing. Concerned that mortality tables for private-sector workers don’t accurately reflect what’s going on among retired government employees, the Society of Actuaries conducted a three-year...

When both Democratic and Republican lawmakers recently joined together to support a taxpayer-funded, multibillion-dollar bailout of big union pension funds, you didn’t need to be a “swamp” creature to know something has gone terribly wrong in Washington, D.C. But that is exactly what happened when U.S. Rep. Richard Neal, Massachusetts Democrat, chairman of the Ways & Means Committee, offered a so-called bipartisan plan to address the pension crisis. However, this proposed bailout of organized labor’s retirement plans would cost federal taxpayers billions — while setting a dangerous precedent that would expose taxpayers and laborers to more financial mischief. The expectation...

Gov. Ron DeSantis did something Friday his predecessor would not: Let former Broward Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes leave office with her dignity intact. DeSantis did away with former Gov. Rick Scott’s suspension of Snipes and accepted her resignation. Snipes welcomed the decision. “I was really concerned about restoring my name and my dignity,” Snipes told the South Florida Sun Sentinel on Friday night. “Now there’s no shadow hanging over the office that I led for 15 years.” DeSantis said it was time to focus on the future. “The important thing is not to throw mud about what happened in the...

I have a Question about National Guard and Retirement. If someone is in the guard and has 20 years in do they retire like a person in the other military services do? Is it different? If they were in the Baby Guard in High school does that somehow count towards retirement?

Illinois ranked No. 48 in an analysis of the state’s ability to pay all of its bills, including public employers’ pension benefits, according to a new ranking of the states’ fiscal health by Truth in Accounting (TIA). Illinois was found to be short $216.1 billion to pay its bills ... The amount of the state’s shortfall in funding to pay off its bills amounts to $50,800 per taxpayer

One of the architects of Mayor Bill de Blasio's housing plan is living well at the taxpayer's expense... Anita Laremont, the executive director of the Department of City Planning, as one of four civil servants raking in more than $300,000 this fiscal year thanks to special permission to receive both a public paycheck and public-pension payments. Waivers granted under Section 211 of New York's Retirement and Social Security Law are supposed to allow the state and local governments to attract and retain employees younger than 65 ... the real number of high-earning double-dippers may be considerably greater because waivers are...

Brenda Snipes, the elections supervisor for Broward County, Fla., who resigned after coming under scrutiny for the way her office handled vote counting during the Nov. 6 election, will receive nearly $130,000 in annual pensions once she leaves office in January, according to reports. Snipes, 75, already receives a pension of more than $58,000 from her time as an educator and is poised to collect another $71,000 for 15 years as an elected official, the Sun-Sentinel reported. "Although I have enjoyed this work tremendously over these many election cycles, both large and small, I am ready to pass the torch,"...

Citing concerns about possible pension liability, Larkspur officials this week took the first step toward severing the city’s membership in the Central Marin Sanitation Agency, a wastewater organization it helped form in the late 1970s. The Larkspur City Council agreed Wednesday to give up the city’s seat on Central Marin’s six-member board of directors, which governs the infrastructure that treats sewage collected from Larkspur and other nearby areas. The council will vote on formal resolutions declaring the city’s severance at future meetings. But Larkspur’s voice won’t be completely flushed down the drain when the withdrawal is finalized, one of the...

According to Paraday’s own calculation of payment due after retirement — which included three unused personal days, 532 unused sick days and 350 unused vacation days multiplied by his nearly $2,000 per diem rate — the district owed him $1,757,229.45, documents show. Paraday allegedly permitted himself to accumulate compensatory time without limit for any day in which he worked more than eight hours, despite his contract not allowing for the accrual or use of comp time. Since fiscal year 2006, when he started as superintendent, Paraday had used 2,484.65 hours of comp time, or the equivalent of 310 days, records...

Two recent studies of public sector pay and retirement benefits show tens of thousands of retired Illinois public employees making six-figures or more in all levels of government, dwarfing figures from states with more people. ... Illinois has more than $130 billion in unfunded pension debt for its five state-run pension systems. Adding in other post employment benefits, that number climbs to more than $200 billion. Municipal governments in Illinois also are struggling with unfunded pension liability. Some report using most, if not all, of their share of property taxes to pay pension costs. Taxpayers United of America said Illinois’...

We have detailed this problem over the past 3-4 years warning people about how bad the pensions around the nation have become nothing more than another ponzi scheme. Most, if not all, state, local and federal pension programs are underfunded by 40% or more.What we stated a mere two months ago, in September 2018! The steam that is building began in earnest in 2012 and has been picking up speed ever since. Look no further than some of the recent events we have documented time and again – Detroit, CALPers, Jeremy Stein, Teamsters and Dallas Pension Fund. All of these...

https://www.kron4.com/news/california/ceo-of-california-s-350b-pension-fund-has-no-degree/1444506328 KRON4 News - CEO of California's $350B pension fund has no degree Updated: Sep 14, 2018 11:07 AM PDT SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - The chief executive of California's $350 billion pension fund does not have a college degree and the revelation has startled some retirees. Marcie Frost leads the California Public Employee Retirement System, the nation's largest retirement system. The Sacramento Bee reports that Frost did not claim to have a college degree when she was hired to lead CalPERS in 2016, but Frost is under fire now after a blogger alleged Frost implied in her application and in a...

Vanecko and Davis. Their firm made millions in fees even as retirement plans for teachers, cops, other Chicago city workers suffered big losses. A dozen years ago, five financially strapped city of Chicago pension funds invested $68 million in a shaky real estate deal put together by a former boss of resident Barack Obama and a nephew of Mayor Richard M. Daley. It was a high-risk investment. Allison S. Davis — who once headed a small Chicago law firm that gave Obama his first job out of Harvard Law School — and Daley nephew Robert G. Vanecko even warned in...

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s financial team is considering borrowing billions of dollars to pour into Chicago’s ailing pension funds — a move they contend could save future taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars but experts say comes with risk. The idea is to issue bonds at relatively low interest rates and use the money to reduce the city’s $28 billion in pension debt. The pension funds would invest the bond proceeds and ideally earn returns that outpace the interest the city would have to pay on the bond debt. Issuing so-called pension obligation bonds would be a first for Chicago, which...

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The house. Food on the table. Survival. Those are some of the ways workers and retirees who demonstrated in Ohio’s capital Thursday described the pension payments they are fighting to protect. “It’s everything, mostly, because you worked all of them years,” said Duane Ross, 61, of Cadiz, who spent 30 years in the mines. Ross was among thousands of unionized coal miners, iron workers, teamsters, bakers, tobacco workers, millers and others who descended on the Ohio Statehouse to rally ahead of a congressional field hearing in Columbus. They brandished signs saying “Save Our Pensions” and wore...

The disgraced Florida sheriff’s deputy who stayed outside as 17 people were slaughtered inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School maintained Tuesday that he was “never” a coward — as parents of slain students railed at him for trying to paint himself as a victim. “The families need to know. I didn’t get it right. But it wasn’t because of some, ‘Oh, I don’t wanna go into that building, oh, I don’t wanna face somebody in there.’ It wasn’t like that at all,” Scot Peterson said on NBC’s “Today” show Tuesday. “I’m never gonna get over this, you know,” he said....

**SNIP** Schneiderman is eligible for a $63,000 a year pension - but the Albany Times Union reports that he has yet to file for retirement with the state. The democrat stepped down last week after reports came out that he assaulted four women.