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OPINIONS
Tom Miller: On pensions, library funding and social worker laws
In case you missed it, there was some really good news in state government last week. The gloom of an anticipated $78 million drain predicted last winter on the state budget to balance the books for a revised pension plan for public school teachers has now turned into a "savings" of as much as $22 million for state government.
The reason for this $100 million difference, legislators learned at the monthly round of interim committee meetings last week in Charleston, is that more of the younger pension plan members rather than the ones nearing retirement made the switch back to the older defined benefits plan.
Financial advisers to the Teachers Retirement System had estimated the Legislature would need to come up with a subsidy of as much as $78 million last winter because they predicted nearly all the members who were 65 or older would switch from the relatively new defined contribution plan to the older defined benefits plan.
But those predictions were off the mark. Only half the members who are 70 or older decided to transfer back and only two-thirds of the 65-to-69 age group opted to rejoin the old plan.
The predictions at the other end were that only one in 10 members 40 years of age or younger would decide to switch back to the old plan, giving up their ability to make their own investments in a 401(k)-style plan where their ultimate pension benefits depend on their own investment strategies -- hence the "defined contribution" name for this plan.
However, more than 75 percent of those younger members decided to return to the defined benefit plan that calculates pensions based on years of service and final salaries. It shouldn't have been that much of a surprise, since this involves far less risk and greater reward in most cases than the newer plan.
That's why the Legislature abandoned it three years ago and began enrolling all newly hired teachers and school service personnel in the older pension system again.
Don't get too excited about this small victory, though. There's still a gigantic amount of unfunded liability in the pension system because of the failure of past legislatures to allocate enough money each year to cover the future obligations. Right now, the experts believe the fund has only 51.3 percent of what is needed in the fund to cover all future obligations -- labeled the "unfunded liability."
So, the governor and the Legislature opted to sell revenue bonds to access hundreds of millions of tobacco settlement money immediately and will use that money to help reduce this deficit over the next quarter century.
Meanwhile, a persistent issue that seems to defy a legislative solution is the matter of special laws that require nine of the state's 55 county boards of education to turn over part of their share of the local property tax revenue to provide funding for county public libraries. Legislative critics argue that it gives these few counties an unfair edge.
But Kanawha County's Board of Education, one of the nine affected, doesn't like this special provision and successfully challenged the law in 2006 in the Supreme Court. It objected to the state board of education including the more than $2 million of local public education tax collections that had to be turned over to the Kanawha County Public Library in its calculation of how much state aid money was needed to finance Kanawha County public schools that year.
As a result, the Legislature was forced to amend the laws and came up with what Senate Education Chairman Bob Plymale, D-Wayne, insists is a "fair solution." It gives these nine counties the option to include public library funding in excess levy funds instead of the regular property tax levy portion earmarked for county school operations.
Still unhappy with its plight, the Kanawha County Board of Education has now gone to court again seeking further clarification after deciding not to include library funding in its last excess levy vote, which is not sitting too well with lawmakers.
Finally, with only five months until the 2009 legislative session gets rolling in February, the prospects for developing any meaningful proposals that could alter state laws in such a way to offer more protection to vulnerable social workers seems a long shot. But an interim subcommittee already working on related issues has been assigned the task of at least giving the problem some attention in coming months.
The murder of a Cabell County social worker during a home visit has sparked interest in finding ways to better protect workers who must visit private homes to do their job, according to House Speaker Rick Thompson, D-Wayne. And the shooting death of a Charleston woman in a fast-food restaurant has once again called attention to the fact West Virginia doesn't have an up-to-date registry of domestic violence protective orders.
Tom Miller is a retired state government reporter for The Herald-Dispatch. He is a regular contributor to The Herald-Dispatch opinion page.
