At our School Board meeting last week I had a quick scare. I had been talking with someone earlier in the day about the Pension Fund at DFTRA and the small but dire possibility that Duluth taxpayers could be stuck with the responsibility of plugging the monstrous financial hole in it.
We were about to pull items from the agenda for discussion and I wanted to make sure our lobbying platform included this hole plugging as a top item. When I took a quick look at it in our folders I didn’t see a subtitle that said anything about pensions. I didn’t have time to read the entire platform before speaking so when called I said that it looked as though we weren’t planning to lobby to fix the pension fun with state money.
I was quickly corrected. It was the first plank in our platform under the heading of “State Budget Surplus.” The surplus is how we intend to sweet talk the legislature to fund our problem. The state has extra money available so we want them to use it to fix the fund. How we would justify this in tougher economic times I have no idea.
At any rate I had asked an old School Board member who has been concerned about our growing liability to find me a short history of state pension funds. He just told me to google the “Minnesota Teachers Fund Consolidation Study.” I found it and its 77 pages long. Its set up as a pdf which means I can print if out if I don’t mind using up all the ink in my printer.
I hate reading so much on a computer screen but now that I’ve tagged it in this post I should be able to find it again when I’ve got an extra hour or two to peruse it.
