Darrell Evans and Nick Glorioso implied in their recent opinion piece that only senators and representatives who support reinstating retirement pensions support public safety. I would disagree with that opinion. Many people I have talked with who moved out of state did so to be closer to family, not because of the pension system. A Google search showed that Alaska has $5,287,250,944 in unfunded liabilities for the previous pension plan as of 2022. They also state that SB 88 will fix the retirement system.
Sen. Cathy Giessel was the main sponsor of S B88, and I recall her being chided at the time because those systems were unaffordable. Why was there no fiscal note attached to S B88? Sen. Giessel knows that one is required by Alaska statute 24 chapter 8 section 35. This is supposed to provide an estimate of how much appropriation increase or decrease would result from the enactment of the bill for the current fiscal year and five succeeding years.
Another question: Why did one of the Senate Finance Committee co-chairs vote against the bill?
The private sector has pretty much done away with retirement pensions because they are unaffordable.
I would suggest that the first move should be to get all of these employees back into Social Security. It was an error to ever take them out of the Social Security system. The salary schedules should be adjusted to make these employees competitive with the private sector.
An additional move would be to have a matching program for the employees so the state, school district, municipality, etc. match up to a certain amount, of how much the employee contributes. And for current matching programs, I suggest increasing the amount of the match. These should be set up on Roth IRAs which would grow tax-free.
Just because a person does not support the unaffordable retirement pension system does not mean that they do not support public safety and EMS.
There are other ways to show support for those employees.
— Jeff Sperry
Eagle River
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