NCPERS News Clips

September 4, 2012

News Clips for September 4th, 2012

• California leaders strike public pension reform deal
  California Governor Jerry Brown and lawmakers have reached a deal to raise public employees' retirement ages, have them pay more into their pension accounts, and cap retirement payments in a vast overhaul of the state's pension system that he says will save $30 billion.
• Rhode Island Setting Standard for Bondholders' Love: Muni Credit
  Central Falls, the first city in Rhode Island's 222-year history to go bankrupt, is preparing to exit court protection after 13 months by keeping bondholders whole while raising taxes and cutting workers and pensions.
• California Lawmakers Approve Private-Pension Management
  California's Assembly passed a bill that would permit as many as 6.3 million private workers without a pension plan to set aside retirement money for management by the state.
• Gap between public, private pensions troubles retirees
  Kenneth Murphy and Alice Jordon are about the same age, worked long careers in their chosen fields and retired on roughly similar incomes. But that's about where the similarity stops. Their differences illustrate the growing divide between retirees in the public and private sectors.
• New York to hike public pension contributions-comptroller
  New York State and its local governments will pay more for public pensions in fiscal 2014, with the average employer contribution to rise to 20.9 percent of workers' salaries from the current 18.9 percent, State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said in a statement on Friday.
• How Plan to Help City Pay Pensions Backfired
  Jeffrey A. Michael, a finance professor in Stockton, Calif., took a hard look at his city's bankruptcy this summer and thought he saw a smoking gun: a dubious bond deal that bankers had pushed on Stockton just as the local economy was starting to tank in the spring of 2007, he said.
•  Op-ed: We can't grow the economy by shortchanging state workers
  Labor Day reminds us how work connects us all, writes guest columnist Jeff Johnson, and state workers shouldn't get shortchanged in the state's labor negotiations.