STUMP » Articles » Public Pensions Primer: Places to Start -- Illinois Pension Primer » 29 April 2015, 01:36

From the Civic Federation we get a PDF Illinois Pension Primer

INTRODUCTION

The State of Illinois’ pension funds and those of many local governments in Illinois are in distress. The landmark pension reforms passed by the Illinois General Assembly for four of the State’s five funds, and three Chicago funds in 2013 and 2014 were a strong step in the right direction. However, much remains to be done.

It is imperative that Illinois continue to enact pension reform legislation, particularly for the Police and Fire pension funds in Chicago, the Chicago suburbs and downstate Illinois. The Civic Federation recognizes that it is difficult to understand the immediate necessity for reforms and their long-term implications without an understanding of how public pensions work. This plain English guide and associated online tutorial is intended to begin to fulfill this need. It focuses specifically on the five State of Illinois pension funds and ten large Chicago-area pension funds.

There are also significant other post employment benefits (OPEB) obligations for the State of Illinois and many local governments across Illinois, mostly for retiree healthcare. Those obligations are outside the scope of this report.

Here is a link to the online tutorial.

That online tutorial is underwhelming to me re: usability, but I will pull one page from it.

Yup, undercontributions. That seems to keep coming up.

There are some scarier graphs within the PDF report itself:

I am going to be looking into this and the Public Plans Database to see if I can get better comparisons between states.