Looks like voters will get to decide whether the city should scrap its current pension program.
Political consultant Pete Zimmerman emailed The Range today to inform us that the Committee for Sustained Retirement Benefits has turned in more than 23,000 signatures to put the Sustainable Retirement Benefits Act on the November city ballot. The group needed 12,730 valid signatures, so there’s lots of padding there to fight off legal challenges.
The initiative would force the city to scrap the current pension program for new hires and instead enroll them in a program similar to a 401K system.
City officials, who have been created a task force to address pension issues, warn that if the initiative passes, it could bankrupt the city because taxpayers would be on the hook for paying out pensions without the benefit of having new employees contributing to the pension program.
The initiative has received its funding from the Liberty Initiative Fund, a new political action committee that has been getting involved in initiative campaigns around the country. More background on the effort here.
More to come on the costs and various claims on both sides.
UPDATED: City Councilman Steve Kozachik commented on the initiative via email:
No two pensions are alike in terms of the demographics of the participants. What this group is doing is proposing a one-size-fits-all solution in several different states. I’ve looked at the petition language and the fundamental question it leaves unanswered is how they’re going to protect the General Fund from collapsing under the weight of people opting out of the current plan. You don’t kill the patient in order to cure the disease. Unless they can explain how collapsing the system is going to save it, I’m not on board with what they’re proposing.
This article appears in Jun 27 – Jul 3, 2013.
Less security and benefits for workers… just what Tucson needs. How can a group called “the Committee for Sustained Retirement Benefits” ‘benefit’ from destroying the current system? I’ve never seen 23,000 signatures collected in this town to benefit the employee. Who are these folks and what do they stand to gain by this?
Looks like they’re funded by a libertarian “think tank”-type of organization that went to the Rand Paul school of “change things without considering the consequences and repercussions of those changes”. Change for change’s sake is not the answer to anything.
The Range.
As an independent, I am undecided.
Sustainable retirement benefits for whom? Many voters have no retirement plan whatsoever. Living on social security in Tucson is next to impossible. I have no idea, at this point, how these voters will view this proposal and doubt most understand it. All are aware of cities flipping upside down based on an overcommitment, however.
Please publish a chart showing the past and project future status of the City’s debt load (as % of tax revenue) and the past and anticipated future obligations of the taxpayers to the proposed plan + old plan and the current system.
Thanks,
Ted Downing
Ted, “Living on social security in Tucson is next to impossible” is the EXACTLY the argument for workers to have an un-weakened alternate retirement plan. It would be most irresponsible for a city or private business to default on it’s debt obligation – and to place undue burden on social security and workers who have traded years of their lives for these benefits. If it meant abandoning the “overcommitment” to ever widening the roads we cannot maintain, unnecessarily relocating utilities with over-excavation, and not building needless 12ft tall graffiti-magnet walls beside them, fiscal responsibility and worker retirement obligations would all be better served.
This is not hard stuff for voters to understand, they will figure it out.