Mayor Brandon Johnson convened more than a year ago to confront the issue will have a limited scope: how to ensure benefits for certain pensioners are at least as robust as Social Security.to meet rising required pension payments, including an advance payment to help the city’s four funds continue to tread water.
Chicago’s Chief Financial Officer, Jill Jaworski, told the Tribune Wednesday that the change was good for transparency, because the city was already paying those additional benefits little by little. Now they are accounting for it. For nearly a decade, Chicago steadily climbed the pension ramp designed to secure enough money so that each fund could meet 90% of its benefit obligations by the mid-2050s. Those payments are expected to continually climb until then, at rates that will likely exceed inflation.
Instead, it will be limited to proposals addressing reforms to ensure that Tier Two and Tier Three pensioners’ benefits pass the “safe harbor” test. Currently, benefits are on track to fall short of benefits equivalent to what retirees would collect under Social Security. The report will be limited to legislative proposals to address that issue in Springfield, likely in the fall veto session.
“We hope the public does not view the pension funding status as a crisis in the way they did 10 years ago,” Jaworski said. “We’re putting in $2 billion more annually than we were a decade ago.” Labor representatives, including leaders at the local rank-and-file police officer union, firefighter union and Chicago Federation of Labor also did not respond to questions about the task force’s work.Casino revenues, which were pitched as one solution to help plug police and fire pension debt, have been slow to pick up. From January through May of this year, the Bally’s temporary casino has generated just $5.5 million in local tax revenues, according to the state’s gaming board.