Huge pensions drain TRS; locals pay their share

I truly enjoyed Mr. Higby’s Aug. 7 letter to this forum titled “TRS figure due to ‘creative bookkeeping.’”

Apparently, Mr. Higby has not looked at the list of retired superintendents draining TRS with those “alleged” $230,000 pensions. People like Gary Catalani, former superintendent of Wheaton-Warrenville Unit District 200, and his $237,195 pension. Over his 35-year career, Mr. Catalani and his school district contributed only $327,135 to TRS (much of that during the last 4 years when his salary exceeded $380,000). For this small contribution, Mr. Catalani is projected to receive more than $9 million worth of pension benefits.

If the residents of Homewood-Flossmoor (and their one school) believe that Superintendent Laura Murray was worth her $402,331 salary (more than the president of the United States earns), let them pay her $238,881 pension, just like they pay the retirement costs of their IMRF employees. The state’s taxpayers were not represented at the bargaining table and had no control over her exorbitant salary, so why are the state’s taxpayers responsible for paying her outlandish pension?

The Sauk Valley may not have any of those $230,000 TRS pensions, but we still end up paying for them.

Even if taxpayers contributed the entire 15.3 percent of teachers’ salaries to Social Security and Medicare, the taxpayers still would be better off than they are using TRS. Over the decade FY2000 to FY2009, the teachers’ contribution (9.4 percent of salary) to TRS was $7.575 billion; while the taxpayers’ contribution was $14.314 billion.

Even though the taxpayers’ contribution was almost 18 percent of salary over the last decade, TRS’s unfunded liability increased from $11.4 billion to $44.5 billion. How much more than 15.3 percent will taxpayers need to contribute?

The belief that taxpayers are saving money by contributing to TRS is a fallacy.