RI’s New Year’s Resolution: Go On a (Pension) Diet
Thursday, December 30, 2010
Forget the new gym routine, revised personal budget, house remodel goals, and all the rest of it. If you are a Rhode Islander hoping you (not to mention your children) can look forward to any kind of a bright future here, there is only one New Year’s Resolution you should be worrying about. Now I realize unless you’re the type whose idea of a special New Year’s Eve is poring through municipal budgets rather than pouring a couple of glasses of wine or champagne, you have probably not made a public policy goal your own personal New Year’s Resolution before. But this year, we all owe it to ourselves to try something a little different. The number one resolution Rhode Islanders should make for this New Year is about slimming down, but it’s not related to food. It’s about paring down the multiple pension funds and rallying behind the creation of one statewide pension plan.
A swirl of late December news reports revolving around pension plan abuses and a soaring unfunded liability in the state’s most visible bankrupt community have reminded us that the wide array of state and municipal overextended pension plans have morphed into a runaway train that responsible citizens must stop in its tracks before the wreck occurs. In Providence, there was the outrageous spectacle of management level firefighters seeking their own demotions to grab compounded COLAs which are contracted to retiring rank-and-file on the force. In Woonsocket, there was the discovery, prominently reported by GoLocalProv.com, that the state’s fully working chief pension fraud investigator, Salvatore Lombardi, is himself a two decades collector of a policeman’s disability pension from that beleaguered city’s fund. (All the while Lombardi is working toward a second pension, courtesy of state taxpayers.)
The third item in December’s news accounts about pension outrages came from the community that has become the state’s Ground Zero of fiscal collapse, Central Falls. As the bankrupt city’s state-appointed receiver, retired Judge Mark Pfeiffer, in a very sobering, but critically important 90-plus page report, pegged the outstanding pension obligation for municipal workers at roughly $80 million. How that frightening tab will be met will surely be a vigorous discussion in the coming months.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTBut one of his central recommendations is a call for the creation of a single system for pensions, with the goal of standardizing benefits across the board, which, he notes, helps to spread out costs in a more efficient, affordable manner. Perhaps the central red flag waving as a result of all this is Pfeiffer’s comment that Central Falls’ finances are not unique among Rhode Island’s municipalities—only the most severe. Judge Pfeiffer is not alone—and is not the first—to be recommending the single plan path. Last fall, Republican candidate for Treasurer Kerry King proposed consolidating the 150 various plans scattered around the state, pointing out that the double dip abuses would be eliminated through a single plan structure.
Whether it’s the firefighter force demotion debacle, the farce of the disability double dip (call it triple-D epidemic), or the bankruptcy of Central Falls, Rhode Island is operating in pure pension collection chaos. We owe to it ourselves to pursue the one pared down pension plan approach. Maybe we should call it the “Pension Diet.” It is, after all, a New Year’s Resolution.
Donna Perry is a Communications Consultant to the Rhode Island Statewide Coalition (RISC) www.statewidecoalition.com.
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