President's Desk

June 15, 2022

Good morning, my friends! We had a great zoom meeting with Bruce Polkowitz, our retired representative on the PFRS board last night. Local 16 member, Ken Buck  and his administrators of his COLA page participated as well.

The good news is we have numbers. Returning COLA will cost $15 million in it's first year. That's if we give it to everybody who's been retired 10 years or who are 62 yrs old with no less than 5 years retired a1% COLA. This would take care of 25,000 retirees who are most in need of COLA initially. Don't panic, that's just a figure that we can apply a multiplier to. For example, giving a full COLA would be about 5 times that number, or $75 million. So, the unit of measure is $15 million for every 1% of COLA. Best of all, the PFRS pension board can vote to return COLA on it's own without legislation. But, like anything else, there's a catch.

Bruce has some heavy lifting to do to get where we need to be. He needs 8 pension board members, of the 12 to vote to support this. He also has to get an actuarial study done to show what if any cost there would be to PFRS. That number will be zero because of the Pension adjustment act (PAA). 585 Towns, cities and the state will once again be responsible for paying their fair share as defined by the PAA. The fund itself wouldn't pay anything towards COLA, nor would it be considered a "Pension Enhancement" as defined by the statute.

Bruce's plan is to start lobbying board members to at least authorize the actuarial study, so we can begin moving forward. Some folks on the board have been saying they have to wait for the state to give us control of our investment money before they can act on COLA. My question is why? The investment money has zero to do with COLA since it won't be used to pay for COLA. I guess that some folks think in a linear fashion, that tasks must be done in a certain order, just because . I'm confident that our board can walk and chew gum at the same time and bring COLA back.  

My friends, we are at a very dangerous crossroads. Inflation is getting worse, not better. We're running at 8.6% with the producer price index reported at over 10% the other day. The fed has raised interest rates another 0.75%. We're headed towards a recession. That's just a fact of life. That's why we need to act now. The state and towns are very well funded for the moment. The state has set record tax revenue records and they're sitting on $3 billion they don't seem to know what to do with.

If we wait too long, we won't be able to get this done. We need movement now! Our next PFRS meeting is going to be on July 11 in Hamilton. We had a nice group when we went last week, but we need to pull out all the stops this time around. We'd like to pack the auditorium with at least 200 members. I'm going to ask the state organization to supply two busses to help transport people from south Jersey and from North Jersey.

I'd like to thank all of you for the support you've shown in getting our COLA back. I believe this is the best way to achieving that goal. Legislation is always a crapshoot. Too much can go wrong. If we can just get the actuary moving on a report, that would be a huge step forward. Will he be successful? I think we will. But more importantly, I know this for a fact.

 The sin is not to try and fail. The sin is to fail to try.

 Joe Valdora