Opposition is rising to new bills filed last weekend to shift more costs of public employee and teacher retirement systems to local governments.
Kenai City Manager Rick Koch says it seems that legislators in Juneau have forgotten what brought about the increased shares that municipalities already shoulder.
Koch: “In 2008 the system went to a shared system because the state had mismanaged it so bad. In lieu of, all of us were going to sue the state we were going to do a class action against them because they had mismanaged it so badly, so there was a settlement of sorts, that the city’s would pick up 22 percent and the state would pick up the rest.”
He says the idea that local government are not handling their share is ludicrous and every change the state has made to the PERS and TRS has shifted costs away from the state but not helped municipalities.
The bills pertaining to the new proposed changes, Senate bills 207, 208, 209 and 210, were heard for the first time in the Senate Finance Committees on Monday.
SB 209 calls for raising local governments’ contribution toward public employee retirement from 22 percent to 26.5 percent by July 1, 2018.
SB 207 proposes local contribution to teachers’ retirement to rise from 12.56 percent to 22 percent by July 1, 2019.
A section of SB 210 would allow municipalities to change the current $150,000 property tax exemption for seniors older than 65.
The Kenai Peninsula Borough School District stated in a release that all of these bills have the potential to substantially increase their budget deficit.