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OPEB COSTS: A PRIMER ON THE LOOMING FISCAL MONSTER THAT WILL DEVOUR PITTSFIELD

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By DAN VALENTI

PLANET VALENTI News and Commentary

First of a Two-Part Series

(FORTRESS OF SOLITUDE, MONDAY, DEC. 29, 2014) — Back in the 1980s, when the 21st century sounded more in the realm of George Jetson than Dan Bianchi, Pittsfield’s OPEB (Other Post-Employment Benefits) funding deadline was 2018. As a starting point, let’s define OPEB. It refers not to pension liabilities (sorry taxpayers, but those must be added to the OPEB totals) but to all other benefits a retired city employee receives, primarily health insurance, life insurance, and anything else overly-generous citizens have thrown in Santa’s bag.

OPEB amount to I.O.U.s by taxpayers of future payments to employees after they retire. Prior to 2004, you didn’t hear too much about these unfunded obligations. In June 2004, though, new governmental requirements went into effect requiring all governmental levels, including cities, to list these unfunded liabilities in annual financial statements. Rightly so, since they are every much part of the financial picture as income and expenses.

The Dreaded Private Sector has had to report these debts since the mid-1950s. Essentially, the rules establish the amount of money cities will need to save today in order to fund the obligations of tomorrow. Just one slight problem: Because OPEB has been such an obscure and little understood matter, cities such as Pittsfield have been doing next to nothing, taking advantage of the fact that the rules do not require pre-funding of liabilities.

A look at a home in Detroit before, during, and after bankruptcy. Is this Pittsfield’s fate? (Photo: AP).

Result: A giant fiscal mess that one day will fall on Pittsfield the way Little Boy and Fat Man fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 … or the way these fiscal bombs rained on cities such as Detroit and Sacramento in the past couple years.

The Crisis Shows No Signs of Letting Up or Going Away

Once you understand that, you can begin to see why OPEB is such a looming, gigantic fiscal problem, for as we all know, health care costs have risen into the stratosphere with no sign of letting up. When these benefits were first negotiated, health care was at best a marginal cost. Pittsfield agreed, for example, to give both retirees and employees 90% of the cost at the expense of taxpayers.

However, the insane jump in the cost of health care added to excessively generous benefits packages handed to municipal unions have transformed OPEB into the fiscal equivalent of an atomic bomb. It has, can, and will devastate entire cities. Ninety percent is a killer. Frightened politicians have dare not adjusted this rate, even though the law requires a 50-50 split.

The unions will argue that the benefits were fairly won, negotiated at the bargaining table. Fair point. Nonetheless, THE PLANET must point out that taxpayers were “represented” by politicians in love with their next election. These spineless creatures wouldn’t dare say “no” to any demand. “Yes” said it all for them, and through each new cycle of negotiation-and-contract, the benefits grew and grew. These taxpayers funded perquisites have ballooned into monstrous proportions.

With each year of passing, that pesky funding deadline kept being pushed ahead, further in time. That was the city’s way of “facing” what the demographics, even back then, outlined with certainty — that the pyramid of benefits the city showered upon its workers and retirees in the form of unfunded obligations would eventually come due. Politics being strictly a short-term game, pushing the deadline forward, ever forward into the future, produced the convenient effect of making the OPEB problem “disappear.”

Today, the city’s OPEB funding deadline is 2040. It will be paid based on an overly optimistic assumed rate of return on investment of 7.75%. Pittsfield taxpayers’ debt obligation, which runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars, is only funded at a ratio of 41.9%. What does all this mean? It means that the city fathers have, in the name of taxpayers, committed their apathetic subjects to obligations they have little chance of meeting without drastic reform (adjustments in the health insurance split, layoffs, renegotiating pension caps, or getting home-rule to re-negotiate OPEB and other benefits). Indeed, the financial picture is so bleak that the best option at this point is bankruptcy, along the lines of Detroit and other cities that were crushed by the greed and avarice of The Special Interests and the enabling of cynical politicians. THE PLANET says this based on the pragmatic assumption that politicians will continue to run and hide from the problem.

OPEB + Pension Liabilities = $350 million Bill for Pittsfield Taxpayers

And remember, pension costs must be added to OPEB liabilities to get the full picture of a city’s indebtedness. In 2011, the last year for which figures are available, Pittsfield had an OPEB bill of $224,749,000 plus an unfunded pension liability of $105,976,000 (ED. NOTE: Pittsfield has funded only 42% of its pension obligations) for a total of $330,545,000. In three years, that total has risen. A rough guesstimate would put the bill north of $350 million — more than a third of a billion dollars.

QUESTION: And from where do you think the city will try to extract one-third of a billion dollars? ANSWER: Gotta mirror?

Yes, you care correct. At some point,  of course, the tax burden will be so great that homes will be lost, businesses will close, and a mass exodus will ensue. It’s already happening, a sad echo to the banner that The Suits hung downtown to broadcast the mirage of a renaissance (“It’s Happening”). The best solution at that point will be bankruptcy.

The most recent analysis of Pittsfield’s OPEB situation reveals the dire facts. Heading into 2015, the city has received a grade of F for transparency about OPEB. It ranks dead last among Massachusetts cities and towns examined.  The Pioneer Institute recently created a new app evaluating Massachusetts’ state and municipal pension plans, where this data originates. The tool is available at MassPensions.com  and includes most of the data provided in the annual reports of the Public Employee Retirement Administration Commission (PERAC) and its predecessor for the period 1985-2012.

Tomorrow, THE PLANET presents Part Two of this two-part series on the OPEB problem. We advise everyone to become familiar and conversant about OPEB, for, Pittsfield, it is your future.

——————————————————————————————-

“He directs ‘Certificate X’ and people now are craning their necks to see her.”Peter & Gordon, “Lady Godiva,” (1967).

“OPEN THE WINDOW, AUNT MILLIE.”

LOVE TO ALL.

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dusty
dusty
9 years ago

Regarding that mass exodus you mention…the people who have waited till that time will own homes with almost zero value because at that time no one will be moving in to the city to buy them. The picture painted is that home values in Pittsfield will continue to drop and at some point, perhaps not that far into the future, they will just drop off significantly. And the poor bastards who did not leave while their home had reasonable worth will not be able to get enough for it to purchase one elsewhere. And many others will have long since lost their homes because they could not pay the taxes which had to be raised exponentially to cover the costs of these unfunded liabilities.

Pat
Pat
9 years ago

North Adams is also in deep trouble. That city can’t even keep their beautiful library functioning. Now they are calling for volunteers to keep it up and running for the public. Businesses keep closing on Main Street. As for Adams, if you drive down their Main Street, there are so many closed storefronts, it looks like a ghost town. Overall, the Berkshires is doing very poorly in my opinion. This didn’t stop the Berkshire Eagle, however, from running a puff piece on Deval Patrick and the wonders he has done for Massachusetts. Despite the fact that Patrick is from Richmond, I don’t see that this county is better off after 8 years of Patrick. All the good stuff was done for the other side of Massachusetts, not the Western end.

Evian
Evian
Reply to  Pat
9 years ago

Agree with you there Pat. Deval did next to nothing for the Berkshires. He did get the streets to his neighborhood redone in Richmond. That’s about it.

charles kronick Berkshires
charles kronick Berkshires
Reply to  Pat
9 years ago

Good points, Pat.

Still wondering
Still wondering
9 years ago

The Eagle piece along with the editorial are indeed scandalous and based on pure fantasy. Even though Deval owns a house in Richmond, his administration has largely ignored Berkshire County except to keep the welfare money flowing in along with new arrivals from NYC and Springfield.
It really is time to leave.

Guess what
Guess what
9 years ago

What you are saying that only the people coming from NYC and Springfield collect welfare? So the born and raise people from Pittsfield are all working and contributing citizen in this community? Perhaps you need to educate your self in the statistics before making this type of comments.

Still wondering
Still wondering
Reply to  Guess what
9 years ago

It’s obvious you don’t live near one of the housing projects in the Pit.

charles kronick Berkshires
charles kronick Berkshires
Reply to  Guess what
9 years ago

G.What:

The story of imported welfare population is not a myth. Mass. public assistance such as providing rent deposits and securities, EBt cards, and housing assistance with no residency requirements are leading to a large influx into the urban areas of the Berkshires.

DV. the solution to the Union deals is implemented in Wisconsin – Right to Work. Probably necessary to resolving the manufacturing dearth in the Commonwealth as well.

Downtown Dweller
Downtown Dweller
Reply to  charles kronick Berkshires
9 years ago

I don’t believe that Guess What was saying that the influx of out-of-area people collecting welfare is a myth. I believe they are commenting that there are plenty of home-grown welfare individuals. I’ve seen a number of people I’ve known since childhood, as well as their children, collecting welfare.

Pat
Pat
Reply to  Downtown Dweller
9 years ago

Not shocking since with hardly any jobs in the area, what else can people do if they don’t have money coming in except to collect public assistance. The job situation is so bad that they have little choice. Despite the supposedly glowing job report for the area that appeared in the Berkshire Eagle recently and was carried on every local radio station, there are not enough jobs here in Berkshire County. The jobs report went on to say that there are tons of jobs, but the people in the area just aren’t educated enough to fill all of these jobs. It’s not that many local people are not educated, it’s that many local employers are education elitists. They would rather hire a two or four year degree graduate who was cranked out of a college system that doesn’t insure quality than a worker who has lots of experience and a great work ethic. I have heard this complaint from many local people who are seeking employment.

If you go to Berkshire Works, however, and try to get any kind of training, you will find that such programs are few and far between. The colleges are just money making machines and their tuitions keep rising each year so that the tuitions are out of reach for many low and middle income families here in the Berkshires.

Guess what
Guess what
Reply to  Downtown Dweller
9 years ago

Exactly! I seen the same in my neighborhood in the years I lived here and Guess what, I wasn’t born nor raised here but I’m proud to say I live and work here. I don’t blame anyone for how our communities have deteriorated but ourselves for allowing it.

charles kronick berkshires
charles kronick berkshires
Reply to  danvalenti
9 years ago

Hopefully secession from the Commonwealth is on the table.

charles kronick berkshires
charles kronick berkshires
Reply to  charles kronick berkshires
9 years ago

Of course we could. We’d prosper in fact. We’d pull out of State grants and government programs. The indigent poor who settled here for the cash will relocate to Central Mass. We’d have no problem attracting Mid-Western manufacturing talent offering generous sites and low taxes.

We have land, rail, airports, and geographical access to markets, and native manufacturing talent. We’d be fine and we would not miss Boston for a day.

Russell Moody
Russell Moody
9 years ago

Does anyone know what the hourly rate is for the average Joe Karpinski City employee of roads and highway? Did i get his name right?

Russell Moody
Russell Moody
Reply to  danvalenti
9 years ago

Karpanski….. Bianchi

(said with a Jerry Seinfeld “Newman” grimmace…)

ShirleyKnutz
ShirleyKnutz
9 years ago

I thought with the high level of our education system our students who are our future would be able to take care of this burden. I do think Pittsfield should start acting like the town it has become. Time to cut the fat off and live within its means.

Nota
Nota
9 years ago

I can remember a certain LOwly councilor saying how not that bad a shape we are in,concerning the unfunded liabilities. There was a certain caller to the former Valenti Show years ago who would call with regularity concerning these liabilities, so this is not a NEW issue.

Tito
Tito
9 years ago

Goodbye Rex!

Jonathan Melle
Jonathan Melle
9 years ago

Re: my friend Dan Valenti is a myopic fiscal conservative
I read Dan Valenti’s blog everyday. I comment about the issues he writes about. A lot of the time, I concur with Dan Valenti’s analsyes of my native hometown of Pittsfield, Massachusetts. However, I disagree with Dan Valenti about public financial management when it comes to local government. There is an optimal local tax rate, which means that in some fiscal years, politicians need to raise taxes above the rate of inflation and growth to fund the municipality. Today (12/29/2014), Dan Valenti wrote about Pittsfield politics’ partially unfunded debt load to its present and retired personnel, which he states is above $350-million dollars, with the worst grade of F for transparency. The reason I see my friend Dan Valenti’s as a myopic fiscal conservative is that Pittsfield is the victim of a negligent state government in Boston. The Governor and Legislature have cut local aid by over 40 percent since the late-1990’s. That is on top of inflationary costs that Pittsfield had no control over. Pittsfield’s municipal costs are more expensive than ever, while its state aid is lower than ever. Dan Valenti is using Republican Party arguments concerning long-term debts, future insolvencies, and possible future bankruptcies in government programs to cut taxes. That argument only makes the fiscal problems worse. It is like pouring gasoline on the fire! Dan Valenti should be arguing for the state government to raise its taxes to pay back municipalities like Pittsfield all the money the state took away over the past 15 years. Dan Valenti should be arguing for the state government to come up with a program to insure municipal debt so that Pittsfield won’t become insolvent over the years. I use the following illustrative example of financial conservatives screwing working class communities like Pittsfield. Long after Proposition 2.5 passed into law in the early-1980’s, wealthy suburban communities like Wellesley, Mass., have “public” schools that have better performance outcomes than New England’s elite private schools. Wealthy suburbs outside of Boston have median home prices over one million dollars. That means the average working stiff can’t afford to live in a wealthy Boston suburb. Yet, these communities have “public” schools and are not financially constrained by Prop. 2.5. Meanwhile, Prop. 2.5 gutted public education funding to working class communities like Pittsfield, Mass., which is very financially constrained by Prop. 2.5. Pittsfield’s schools are now among the bottom in performance outcomes in Massachusetts. As a result of fiscal conservatism, the wealthy suburbs of Boston’s “public” schools are more elite than its neighboring private schools, while communities like Pittsfield and North Adams got screwed. But, Dan Valenti would probably try to sell Prop. 2.5 to the working class people of Pittsfield, whose children end up working poor, on welfare assistance programs, or worse, in the Pittsfield jail. I would also inquire to Dan Valenti about the 2008 bail out of Wall Street and governmental financial firms like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that cost taxpayers trillions of dollars. This was done by the Republican Party Bush II White House and continued under the Obama administration. The Wall Street bailout added trillions to our huge national debt. Now, the Republican Party is taking over Congress next week. The Republicans are going to argue against funding the government, while pointing to the government’s huge debts. It is all such hypocrisy. The bottom line is that politicians from the banks of the PCBs filled Housatonic River to the banks of the Potomac River in Washington, D.C. should find the optimal level of funding the government without myopic fiscal conservative arguments that favor the wealthy at the expense of the working class.
– Jonathan Melle

Ed Check
Ed Check
Reply to  Jonathan Melle
9 years ago

Most government financial analysts with good economists and actuaries can calculate the financial curve that varies the tax rate and projects the tax revenue for its maximum value. I believe the Reagan administration did this when it cut the federal tax rate. It produced massive federal revenues…the problem, the Congress never followed through on spending cuts, and continued its increases.
From a conservative Kennedy era Democrat.

PopKornSutton
PopKornSutton
9 years ago

Plain simple and quick, when and if the Republicans cut government spending, chaos will ensue. It ain’t gonna happen.

PopKornSutton
PopKornSutton
9 years ago

We will go to war with North Korea..Poppa K

Jonathan Melle
Jonathan Melle
Reply to  danvalenti
9 years ago

Pittsfield’s finances are unsustainable. Thousands of people have and continue to move away from Pittsfield. There have been hundreds of lost jobs in Pittsfield over the past decade. Everything in Pittsfield is getting worse. Mayor Dan Bianchi and his cronies are in denial of the facts that Dan Valenti is pointing out in his blog. So was Jimmy Ruberto and his regime. I don’t know how rearranging chairs on the deck of a sinking boat helps!