Westchester County, the New York suburb where household income is 53 percent above the U.S. average, wants to use its top credit rating to sell taxable bonds to finance pension contributions and avoid increasing the highest taxes in the country.
The community of 955,962 residents on New York City’s northern border is home to International Business Machines Corp. and soft-drink maker PepsiCo Inc. It faces a $54 million payment to the state retirement plan in 2011, $78 million in 2012 and $163 million in 2015, said County Executive Robert Astorino, who’s working to close a $166 million budget gap next year.
The county, the only one in New York with the highest credit grade from the three largest rating companies, can borrow from bond investors at 2.5 percent compared with paying 5 percent under a state program that allows government employers to make pension contributions with IOUs, he said.
“Pension costs are rising so fast that taxpayers have absolutely no way to keep up with them,” Astorino, a Republican, said at a Dec. 7 conference in Albany sponsored by the Empire Center for New York. “It’s the ultimate insult to taxpayers to burden them with the double whammy of unsustainable pension costs financed at unconscionable interest rates.”….
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