The state Senate’s one-house budget puts its own twist on Governor Cuomo’s dubious pension “smoothing” plan. The Senate version would give the state, as well as localities and school districts, the option of significantly under-paying pension contributions over the next few years... Read More
The state pension fund gained about 10.4 percent on its investments during the recently ended 2012-13 fiscal year, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli announced today. The latest gain is comfortably above the pension fund’s 7.5 percent target rate of return. Read More
New York State’s Common Retirement Fund, which underwrites state and local pensions, returned a negative 0.92 percent on its assets during the quarter ending June 30, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli just announced. That would translate into a loss of about $1.2 billion on an asset base of roughly $148 billion. Read More
The New York State Teachers’ Retirement System (NYSTRS) has retained Cheiron, an actuarial and financial consultancy with a national practice, to analyze Governor Cuomo’s proposal to give school districts a “flat rate” option for pension contributions. Read More
Well, what do you know? Seventy-one percent of public school teachers in New York think new teachers should be able to choose between a traditional defined-benefit pension and a defined-contribution (DC) plan, like the one available to State University of New York (SUNY) professors for nearly 50 years, according to a poll the Empire Center poll released today... Read More
The New York State Teachers’ Retirement System (NYSTRS) has just informed school districts across the state that their teacher pension contribution rates for the 2013-14 school year will rise from the current 11.84 percent to between 15.5 and 16.5 percent of salaries — which would translate into an additional taxpayer costs totaling $539 million to $686 million, based on the latest available teacher payroll figures. Read More
An alert reader has provided the answer to a question posed on this blog yesterday: how or where did the state’s largest public employee union come up with its estimate that Governor Cuomo’s proposed Tier 6 pension plan will “reduce benefits” by 40 percent? Read More
New York’s new “stable option” pension gimmick for local governments and school districts is “a stopgap with long-term risks,” Moody’s Investor Service warned this week. Read More