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Senate Co-Sponsorship Memoranda
Senate of Pennsylvania
Session of 2017 - 2018
Regular Session
MEMORANDUM
| Posted: | January 10, 2017 02:53 PM |
|---|---|
| From: | Senator Mike Folmer and Sen. Patrick J. Stefano |
| To: | All Senate members |
| Subject: | Reintroduction of Restricting Public Pension for Future Association Employees |
| In the near future, we will be reintroducing Senate Bill 408 from last session to remove future non-public employees of the Pennsylvania School Boards Association (PSBA) from being eligible for public pension benefits. Previous cosponsors were: Scarnati, Eichelberger, Vulakovich, Argall, Hutchinson, Alloway, White, Vance, Aument, Rafferty, Dinniman, and Bartolotta. While admittedly a small step toward addressing the many problems of Pennsylvania's public pension systems, we believe that if you’re not a public employee, you shouldn’t be on Pennsylvania’s pension system. This legislation is supported by PSBA. Pennsylvania’s public pension systems are drowning in seas of red ink: the combined PSERS (Pennsylvania School Employees’ Retirement System) and SERS (State Employees’ Retirement System) unfunded liabilities exceed $60 Billion and are growing by $10 Million a day – over $3 Billion a year. Even if we were to raise taxes $1 Billion a year to try to address these liabilities, it would take 60 plus years to put a dent in the Commonwealth’s current pension liabilities. A properly designed pension plan has a “healthy” funding ratio of at least 80%. Both PSERS and SERS are well below these ratios and both continue to decline, which are prime reasons why Pennsylvania’s bond rating has been downgraded several times. We hope you will join with us in taking this small step toward addressing Pennsylvania public pension crises. |
Introduced as SB370