Posts Tagged: unfunded

News

State pension systems: NY outperforms California

The CalPERS board of governors during a meeting at the pension system's headquarters. (Photo: CalPERS)

New York state pension systems are better funded than California state pension systems, currently take a smaller bite out of state and local government budgets, and still provide pension benefits well above the national average. How do they do it?

News

CalPERS makes debt, cost difficult to see

CalPERS' governing board during a 2013 meeting. (Photo: CalPERS board)

Calpensions: New annual CalPERS reports no longer prominently display the pension debt of local governments as a percentage of pay, making it more difficult for the public to easily see the full employer pension cost.

News

Pension initiative tracks Utah law

Protesters picketed the recent appearance of pension-change advocates Chuck Reed and Carl DeMaio at the Reason summit. (Photo: Ed Mendel, Calpensions)

Calpensions: One of the two initiatives filed by a pension reform group last week would cap state and local government spending on retirement benefits for most new hires at 11 percent of pay, much like a Utah pension reform five years ago.

News

Special session: Fixing the potholes

Downtown Los Angeles, as traffic zips along. (Photo: Sean Pavone)

Gov. Brown’s call for a special legislative session to fix California’s crumbling roads, highways and bridges comes as music to the ears of those who build big projects. For months, groups representing labor, contractors, local governments, transportation interests and others worked on legislation to revamp the state’s roads and ease the movement of freight at the state’s ports. That legislation may serve as the centerpiece of the special session.

News

Initiative targets CalPERS’ ‘poison pill’

A pension reform initiative filed last week requires voter approval of termination fees, the big upfront payment demanded by CalPERS when a plan is closed to new members. CalPERS says it needs the money to ensure payment of the pensions promised members who remain in the closed plan. The termination fee is calculated by dropping the pension fund earnings forecast from the current 7.5 percent to as low as 2.98 percent.

News

LAO: Lawmakers should look closely at Brown plan for retirees’ health care

An elderly patient receiving health care at a hospital. (Photo: Photographee.eu, via Shutterstock)

The LAO, noting that most of Brown’s plan bypasses the Legislature, says lawmakers should hold hearings on state worker retiree health care, going back to square one, 1961, when the benefit began. Times were different then. Workers were at risk of losing health coverage when they retired. Now state workers are eligible for federal Medicare at age 65.

News

Brown: Judges’ pensions on to-do list

For the new plan the state this fiscal year is paying $63.2 million (24.6 percent of pay) for the pensions of 1,407 judges (1,352 active). Judges Retirement System II is 95 percent funded with a debt or “unfunded liability” of $41.2 million.

News

Small town eyes CalPERS exit costs

Calpensions: A small but affluent Orange County city, with a current staff of only a half dozen employees, would have to pay about $3.6 million to leave CalPERS, the giant state pension system estimated two years ago. “I almost feel like just handing this to a reporter and saying, ‘Look at this.’

News

Public pension bill eyes ‘excess earnings’

Calpensions.com: The bill said to represent three years of talks mainly between the IRS and the Orange County system, the informal leader in the negotiations, moved out of the Assembly public employees retirement committee with no discussion.

Support for Capitol Weekly is Provided by: