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Lake Worth's pension plans are $130 million in the red according to interim finance director, Steve Carr. Click here to see the video and the report on Channel 12.
Recently we were given an F grade. Didn't the Vice Mayor tell us during the bond money grab that we had no debt?
9 comments:
No wonder they were like rabid dogs trying to grab our money using the 20/20 bond and road repairs as a smoke screen.. They had some huge holes in the budget to fill !
11:38, idiotic and stupid statements. This took decades of mismanagement to get into the position we find ourselves. Can you explain any part of your rant with facts?
It is a real problem, not just for us, but for many small and large municipalities around the country. I'm not against pensions but many programs are simply unsustainable. Looking at LEO and fire fighter pensions, most of these folks will end up drawing pension benefits for many more years than they worked. Retiring after 20 years and they can start collecting right away. Pension payouts should begin only at age 65 not at age 45.
I agree with 8:18, our pension problems are years and years in the making, but the City leaders were completely disingenuous when they repeatedly claimed the City had no debt during the LW2020 campaign.
If you can call sucking up to the Unions by granting lucrative and unsustainable contracts mismanagement, then you are correct. The question now is, what are we doing about the problem going forward?
Do we even have control over our LEO/Fire pensions anymore? I don't think we do b/c of the merger with PBSO. As such, PBSO would have to change its pension system, which I can't imaging ever happening to give us some relief on that front.
Problem is we are still responsible for the old pension liability of our Police Department and Fire Department before we went with the county. THAT is the unfunded amount they are talking about.
That is why we have no money in the general fund to fix roads. They are technically correct. We have no debt. We DO have unfunded liability, meaning that we will be in debt very soon if we don't do something about it, that if not addressed can bankrupt us.
Your hero wanted to charge an assessment to offset that liability. You came out wholeheartedly against it because everyone would pay the same amount. We will probably need to look at that again.
My hero, as you put it, was for a fire assessment because we were paying $1.72 for every $1 in salary or something obscene such as that. She wanted to bail us out short term. The City's argument was that pension costs are a part of fire/rescue services...the cost of doing business and we didn't buy it. The City, through one-sided contract negotiations, can't pay for these pensions (or don't want to) and wanted the taxpayer to bail them out. This fire assessment, although only for one year, would have been voted on every year in a new Resolution/Ordinance as pension costs will continue to go up.
Those of us against this made the correct assessment by saying NO. We already pay right under 4 mills for fire services.
We put money into these accounts every year--employees, police and fire. So we are talking about a huge albatross around the necks of taxpayers in this city.
Is there something about taxes you like, anonymous? What about better solutions? Why should the people continue to ball out government especially for pensions that they don't even have themselves?
All employees that work for the City contribute to once a month on their paychecks. So if an employee worked 20 years, From the first month of their employment they deducted a % of money. So where is ALL that money they deducted and what did that do with it, if it was unfunded?
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