Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Chair Sharon Bulova
Once upon a time, way back in the year 2000, Fairfax County’s general-employee pension plan was amply funded at 109% of projected needs. But the funding ratio dropped severely during the last recession and has been hovering around 70% in recent years. Today unfunded pension liabilities for Virginia’s largest local government are roughly comparable in size to that of the Virginia Retirement System, which which state employees and many local government employees participate.
Taxpayer groups are sounding the alarm and, astonishingly, the Board of Supervisors is actually studying proposals to address the shortfall.
County officials have proposed a range of tweaks to the pension plans for public safety workers and general employees. (School teachers have their own plans not controlled by the county board.) Among the changes: The minimum retirement age would be bumped from 55 to 60, the retirement-eligibility formula would increase age + years served from 85 to 90, and the final salary-averaging period for calculating retirement-payments would be increased from three to five. The changes would apply only to new employees hired on or after July 1, 2019, reports Inside NoVa.
Said Board Chair Sharon Bulova (D): “The Board, all of us, have felt this is a contractual, really, issue. If you joined the county under certain expectations and you’ve based your retirement plans on what you believed would be the deal when you came to the county, we are not changing that for current employees.”
Sean Corcoran, president of the Fairfax Coalition of Police Local 5000 described the proposed pension changes as “a completely contrived crisis.” Others speaking for county employees warned that the plan would create a new class of “second-class employee” and would hurt morale and recruitment.
But taxpayer advocates said the proposed reforms were just a start.
Arthur Purves, president of the Fairfax County Taxpayers Alliance, said while the county’s population increased 20 percent since 2000, inflation-adjusted salaries for county employees rose 35 percent, health-insurance payments went up 194 percent and pension costs increased 244 percent.
County real estate taxes since 2000 have increased three or four times more than the inflation rate, said Purves, who blamed compensation increases as the culprit.
The proposed pension cuts for new employees “are only a small and necessary start,” he said. “You need to look at raises.”
McLean Citizens Association president Dale Stein said county pension borrowing went up $600 million during the last three years and added officials were basing their calculations on average annual returns on investment of 7.25 percent, while returns over the past decade averaged just 5.9 percent.
“We strongly urge the Board of Supervisors to ensure a strong, competitive compensation package for all county employees,” Stein said. “In making those packages possible, the realistic question is, ‘Where in the heck is that money going to come from?'”
The Inside NoVa article did not say how much the proposed changes would reduce the unfunded liabilities.
Bacon’s bottom line: You can keeping kicking the can down the road but eventually you run out of road. The time to act is now. Relatively small changes today can fix a problem that is still a couple of decades away from a full-blown crisis. Failure to enact reforms, however, will make necessary changes all the more painful in future years.
I am following up on an earlier post discussing the capital budget recommendations of the Governor and the Commonwealth’s debt capacity. Jim Bacon’s recent post discussing Secretary of Finance Aubrey Layne’s worries about increasing debt also dealt with this general issue.
