Chicago City Wire

During a news conference alongside Illinois House Republicans, Wirepoints President Ted Dabrowski echoed calls for much-needed legislation to amend existing pension laws to solve the deepening pension crisis in the cities of Illinois.

Wirepoints is a non-profit research organization that studies the government and economy of the state of Illinois.

"The pension crisis at the state level gets all the attention but, if you listen to the legislature most of them are ignoring what's happening to our cities," Dabrowski said. "Whether it be Rockford, Peoria, Danville — many of them are struggling under the weight of skyrocketing pension costs."

Highlighting a detailed Wirepoints Report that studied unfunded pensions in the state's 175 municipalities, Dabrowski pointed out that there has been a significant change over the years.

“We looked at 2003 and 2019 and we measured how things have changed. We graded on metrics, each on 10 points,” he said. “On a scale of zero to a hundred, A to an F. What we found is a dramatic drop in those 16 years. In 2003 based on the metrics we looked at just 7 cities failed, by 2019, 102 cities had failed.”

A key finding of the Wirepoints report includes this troubling reality that in 2003, 21 of the 175 cities that have been reviewed “had less than 60 cents on hand for every dollar they needed to fund the future benefits of their police, firefighter, and IMRF funds," the report stated. The 60 percent funding level is perceived as a point of no return — pension funds can’t recover. Sixteen years later, 99 of the 175 cities they have assessed have not reached the 60 percent funding level.

"Our fear is if we will continue the same path of the last 15 years, it will just get worse and spiral faster," Dabrowski said.

He maintained that the goal of the Wirepoints report is to bring attention to the pension crisis hitting the cities of Illinois and that there's no way the cities can be fixed without addressing pensions, “and that means we need a pension amendment,” he said. 

Gov. Pritzker isn't high on the idea of a constitutional amendment to cut retirees’ benefits, calling it a "fantasy" and that any attempt to pass an amendment would be futile.

The governor claimed that “The idea that all of this can be fixed with a single silver bullet ignores the protracted legal battle that will ultimately run headlong into the Contracts Clause of the U.S. Constitution.”