Municipalities throughout Illinois are saddled with huge pension debt. Some try to get out from under it by selling city assets. Those with nothing of value to sell may resort to laying off city workers, cutting back services, etc., and still come up short.
Of course, they can always raise taxes, just like our representatives in Springfield do, but that only makes matters worse as citizens relocate to saner communities and states, and revenue streams decline even further.
The one thing they can’t do, apparently, is the one thing that could possibly work: fulfill their primary obligation as public officials to balance the budgets entrusted to them and address the pension problem head-on.
So, the problem keeps getting worse, as documented by Wirepoints, a group that focuses on state and local pension research and recently awarded “F” grades to 102 of the state’s 175 biggest cities. In Madison County, Alton and East Alton both got an F, Wood River got a D, and Edwardsville got a C. The situation in all four communities has deteriorated over a 16-year period, with city taxpayers contributing more to pensions even as pension debts rise and government services are pared back.
Public officials can’t keep raising taxes because that’s self-defeating. They can’t keep cutting services because eventually there won’t be any left and the governments will no longer have any reason for being. The pensions must be renegotiated – bilaterally with the cooperation of the unions, or unilaterally without their cooperation, if necessary. There’s no other way.
Sure, sure, promises were made and contracts signed: by irresponsible officials who seem to have no understanding of grade-school math, no qualms about placing unsustainable burdens on constituents, and no concern about the dark future that looms for all of us and our children. They just keep kicking the can down the road, hoping that the Ponzi scheme they created lasts long enough for them to qualify for their own exorbitant pensions.
Where they should retire, when the time comes, is to the place of their own making: debtors’ prison.