Thanks Dude, for a couple of articles regarding the relationship between nationwide financial distress and the pension deficit.
https://www.naturalnews.com/2024-12-05-us-pension-systems-verge-of-debt-collapse.html
Just like Chico, “‘Pension systems throughout the U.S. are falling deeper into what experts term “pension debt paralysis,’ even in the face of record-setting contributions from state and local governments.“
Chico has fallen into “pension debt paralysis” – as predicted years ago, our city is spending so much money on the pensions, there is no more money left in the General Fund to provide the kind of services you would naturally expect in return for your tax dollars, like street and sewer maintenance, cops and fire. Yes, they’ve made record-setting contributions, increasing every year by millions, but our pension debt just keeps going up, up, up.
California as a state is in the same boat. “Equable.org reported that the Illinois pension system was underfunded by more than $210 billion as of last June; California is the only state that had a bigger shortfall. ”
As states all around the union find themselves with the same shortfall,
https://www.naturalnews.com/2024-12-06-report-finds-half-us-states-going-bankrupt.html
they’re seeing the same effects we live with every day in Chico – “The biggest factor contributing to state debt is unfunded retirement liabilities, reports indicate… Oliver Giesecke from Stanford University warns that they are a costly form of debt that diverts funding away from public projects and infrastructure… The short of it is that the more time that passes, the worse things are going to get for everyday Americans who will have to pay increasingly more for increasingly less.”
The following piece from CNBC explains how COVID funding artificially inflated state and local budgets with free money that was spent for questionable purposes, and how this extra money actually exacerbated debt for many public agencies across the country.
In Chico we also had emergency funding from various wild fires and then the PG&E settlement. Fucking MILLIONS. I’ve explained here where much of that money went, for stuff like outdoor dining for restaurants and bars, new staff positions with salaries over $100,000/year, and raises – our city manager’s salary, just for example, went up over $20,000 in the last couple of years.
New positions and salary increases are not the best way to handle your pension deficit. That’s like putting more money on your credit card when they raise the interest rate. It’s time for the taxpayers to question the way our public officials run our city. If you ran your house the way Sorensen runs the city of Chico, you’d be calling Laurel, today.
Chico Taxpayers Association 