{"id":19690,"date":"2015-03-12T17:41:11","date_gmt":"2015-03-13T00:41:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/?p=19690"},"modified":"2015-03-12T17:41:11","modified_gmt":"2015-03-13T00:41:11","slug":"nevada-pers-reform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/nevada-pers-reform\/","title":{"rendered":"Nevada PERS Reform"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Jim<\/a>(Jim Clark) –\u00a0Gov. Sandoval\u2019s State of the State speech was jam packed with ideas for his reform agenda.\u00a0 His area of emphasis was to fix public education, a change-resistant colossus which prior legislatures have unsuccessfully tried to fix by throwing taxpayer money at it.\u00a0 Other reforms high on his list included curbs on public employee collective bargaining and squeezing the waste out of public building costs by requiring competitive (union and non-union) bidding.\u00a0 But he only made a brief mention of fixing Nevada\u2019s Public Employee Retirement System (PERS).<\/p>\n

What needs fixing?\u00a0 By one estimate, PERS is legally committed to pay defined benefit pension liabilities of about $41 billion dollars more than it has or will have in the future.\u00a0 $41 billion?\u00a0 Take Gov. Sandoval\u2019s proposed $7.3 billion biannual budget and imagine that from 2016 forward Nevada had only income and no expenses.\u00a0 It would take over ten years of revenue to fix that $41 billion dollar deficit.\u00a0 But running Nevada for ten years with zero expenses is not going to happen; so where will the money come from to cover the shortfall?<\/p>\n

It will come from the State of Nevada, all 17 counties and school districts, all police and fire departments in Nevada, all cities, towns and general improvement districts in Nevada (except IVGID . . . more on that later) . . . \u00a0in short any governmental instrumentality which employs people.\u00a0 All of these entities contribute to PERS based on salaries paid to their staffs.\u00a0 In most cases, public employees pay 5.75% of their salaries into PERS and their employer pays the rest.\u00a0 How much is the \u201crest\u201d?\u00a0 20% percent for regular employees and just under 40% for police and firefighters.\u00a0 And when these chickens come home to roost where will all these government employers get the money?\u00a0 We taxpayers of course.<\/p>\n

How did the shortfall come about?\u00a0 The PERS board is required by Nevada law to consist of 7 members all of whom must be state of municipal employees with at least 10 years tenure so it\u2019s like the fox guarding the chicken coop.\u00a0 Add to that the sweetheart deals that public employee unions make regarding overtime pay, longevity pay, etc. that bump retirement benefits and the relatively short qualifying period (20 years if they purchase 5 years of \u201cair\u201d time) the mathematical result becomes a certainty.\u00a0 Faced with that reality the PERS board kicks the can down the road by assuming an unrealistic annual return on fund investments so everything looks hunky dory.<\/p>\n

Although Gov. Sandoval gave short shrift to PERS reform Incline\/Crystal Bay\u2019s Assemblyman, Randy Kirner (R \u2013 Reno), a former Public Employees\u2019 Benefits Board Chair, has tried to fix this problem since he was first elected only to have his proposed bills killed by Democratic committee chairs.\u00a0 Now that the GOP controls both the Nevada Senate and Assembly he finally saw his chance.<\/p>\n

His first proposal was Assembly Bill 3, a modest proposal that would add two public members to the PERS board who could not be beneficiaries and who must have knowledge or experience in the management and design of retirement plans.\u00a0 What happened?\u00a0 Due to vociferous public employee union opposition the measure lost in a vote in the Government Affairs Committee.\u00a0 Kirner is not giving up.\u00a0 His AB 190 would create a PERS pensions into a defined contribution plan for employees hired after July 1, 2016 which will make the plan sustainable.<\/p>\n

I said above that IVGID employees are not in the PERS system.\u00a0 When IVGID was first formed it signed an agreement with Social Security.\u00a0 Our GID also provided employees with a sort of 401k plan which is individual to each staffer.\u00a0 A few years ago IVGID was investigating PERS and was told by Social Security that it could not exit the program.\u00a0 Hallelujah. Whatever happens with pension reform local taxpayers will not have to bail out IVGID.\u00a0 However we could still be on the hook for Washoe County, the school district, etc.<\/p>\n

Epilog:\u00a0 Randy Kirner is fighting on a lonely battlefield.\u00a0 We need to support him.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jim Clark is President of Republican Advocates.\u00a0 He has served on the Washoe County and Nevada GOP Central Committees.\u00a0 He can be reached at tahoesbjc@aol.com.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(Jim Clark) –\u00a0Gov. Sandoval\u2019s State of the State speech was jam packed with ideas for his reform agenda.\u00a0 His area of emphasis was to fix public education, a change-resistant colossus which prior legislatures have unsuccessfully tried to fix by throwing taxpayer money at it.\u00a0 Other reforms high on his list included curbs on public employee […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":19691,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19690"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19690"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19690\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19693,"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19690\/revisions\/19693"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19691"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19690"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19690"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/nevadanewsandviews.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19690"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}