FCC and unsustainable pension plan for city employees

[Anonymous]

FCC resident here. The pension fund was under my radar until the News Press published a story about the debate on how to spend our Water Works "windfall." We're paying around thirty percent more property tax than Surrounding communities. Our schools are great but with our historic tendency to limit commercial/business development, we will soon be in a crisis trying to fund a pension plan that needs to be phased out while keeping our schools fully funded. It's not sustainable with our current strategy.

We need to switch to some other method to fund this and eliminate it for all new hires. How do other cities forecasting this burden handle this? How do we follow suit? Is it reasonable to offer a buy-out to cut our future losses? Who gets pensions anymore?

Is anyone on board with this? I assume if you are a city employee you would not be, so I'd like to hear from others on this issue and how we can change it before it becomes a financial crisis.

[Anonymous]

This site follows examples of this all over the country

http://www.pensiontsunami.com

[Anonymous]

How much is slated for the pension fund??

[Anonymous]

I agree that pensions are entirely inappropriate in this day and age. Both because of the advent of 401k style defind contribution options and because of the increased awareness of the utter lack of predictability in financial markets, even over long periods. I'm a FCC taxpayer and I am extremely concerned about the series of poor long term planning decisions by the city council. Unfortunately, given the extremely liberal bent of the FCC elected officials, I highly doubt there is the political will to make the hard decisions about limiting future pension liabilities.