{"id":414553,"date":"2010-03-10T15:54:10","date_gmt":"2010-03-10T20:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"tag:typepad.com,2003:post-6a00d8341c60fd53ef01310f88ef35970c"},"modified":"2010-03-10T15:54:10","modified_gmt":"2010-03-10T20:54:10","slug":"daley-says-pension-fix-ideas-on-the-way","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/414553","title":{"rendered":"Daley says pension fix ideas on the way"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><em>Posted by Hal Dardick<\/em> at 2:40 p.m.<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>Mayor Richard Daley signaled today that controversial recommendations for reforming the city\u2019s employee pension systems will be coming soon.<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>The announcement came more than two years after the mayor appointed a commission to of top financial managers to find ways to strengthen pension funds for the city, Park District, Chicago Housing Authority and City Colleges of Chicago.<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>\u201cI expect these recommendations to come very shortly,\u201d Daley said. \u201cWe all recognize that the status quo will not work. . . . It\u2019s time to reform a system that isn\u2019t working for our city\u2019s budget, our city\u2019s taxpayers or for some of our employees, for that matter.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><\/br>Daley went on to suggest the recommendations won\u2019t be timid. \u201cI hope it\u2019s controversial,\u201d he said. \u201cIt has to be. If it\u2019s not controversial, then it\u2019s not worth anything.\u201d<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>Earlier this week, the Civic Federation, a non-partisan government budget watchdog group primarily funded by business interests, <a href=\"http:\/\/newsblogs.chicagotribune.com\/clout_st\/2010\/03\/chicago-taxpayers-on-hook-for-444-percent-more-in-government-pensions-than-a-decade-ago-report-says.html\">released a report<\/a> indicating local unfunded government pension liabilities in Chicago have grown nearly five-fold in the past decade.<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>Inadequate pension funding long has been recognized as a growing problem threatening the solvency of local and state budgets in many parts of the country.<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>\u201cI cannot overstate how important this is,\u201d Daley said. \u201cWe need pension reform to protect Chicago taxpayers and their interests.<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>\u201cRemember, people across the nation and in Chicago, they are angry at what they see as a system that puts government bureaucrats ahead of taxpayers. At this very same time, they are threatened with losing their jobs and pensions.\u201d<br \/><\/br><br \/><\/br>Daley said he had yet to see the recommendations, but suggested one target of reforms would be \u201cdouble dipping,\u201d in which someone retires from a government job and gets hired for another government post while receiving a pension.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Posted by Hal Dardick at 2:40 p.m.Mayor Richard Daley signaled today that controversial recommendations for reforming the city\u2019s employee pension systems will be coming soon.The announcement came more than two years after the mayor appointed a commission to of top financial managers to find ways to strengthen pension funds for the city, Park District, Chicago [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3992,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-414553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3992"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=414553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414553\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=414553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=414553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}