Wednesday, April 17, 2013

California pension fund will likely be paid off in 5 years, rather than 15 years


Leaders of the California Public Employees System voted this afternoon to speed up payments on the fund's long-term liabilities with an accounting change that will trigger higher contributions of up to 50 percent from taxpayer-funded state and local governments and school districts over the next few years. Wonder if Pacifica saw this coming.  (Jim Wagner)

Yeah, but can we afford to shorten CA pension debt by 2/3rds?
Sacramento Bee/Jon Ortiz, 4/17/13, "The State Worker".  CalPERS' change to hike contributions for state, local governments."

"State and local governments would pay billions of dollars more to the California Public Employees' Retirement System over the next few years under new policies approved by a key CalPERS committee Tuesday.

The policy changes would require the nation's biggest public pension fund to spread its gains and losses over five years instead of its current 15-year "smoothing" period, and to figure its obligations on a fixed 30-year payoff schedule. For several years, CalPERS has rolled those liabilities forward instead of setting a date to pay them off.

The policies go today to CalPERS' full board of administration, which will likely approve them.
The new accounting methods would force CalPERS, which has $87 billion in unfunded liabilities, to send bigger bills to the 2,200 state, local governments and school districts in the system to pay down those obligations.  For example, the state and schools would see their payments increase from a combined $5 billion or so in fiscal 2015-16, when the smoothing policy takes effect, to more than $7.4 billion five years later."   Read article.

Submitted by Jim Wagner 

Posted by Kathy Meeh

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This change has been openly discussed for a couple years. Unless they really are brain dead, you'd better believe it's been on the radar of council and senior staff. What's next kids? Anything you'd like to talk about?

Anonymous said...

Let's just divert all the money from schools to the State. Forget about educating our kids, change the child labor laws, and put them all to work in sweat shops at age 7. in the meantime, extend/expand the H1 Visa Program and bring in literally thousands more of already educated tech workers. Way to go, California!