by Joshua Sharf

Last fall, members of the Colorado Public Employee Retirement Association (PERA) got some bad news: the amortization periods for the public pension system’s two largest funds had ballooned dangerously. Under current assumptions, the state fund would not be fully funded for 55 years, and the even larger school fund would not be fully funded for 75 years. Both of these far exceeded PERA’s target of 30 years established under a set of 2010 reforms passed by the legislature, known by their bill number, SB1.

The proximate causes of this slide were PERA’s lowering the expected rate of return from 7.5 percent to 7.25 percent, and adopting new actuarial tables that assume longer lifespans. But those are simply measurements of reality, not actual attempts to change the reality of PERA’s instability.

Read the whole article originally published in The Hill on June 22, 2017.